Medical data on demand with WebMIA

This article focuses on the creation of a system for managing and archiving large-scale medical data. Specifically, this case study demonstrates the new paradigm through the prototype system WebMIA. The system enables storage, maintenance, sharing, updating, and retrieval of medical files based on the existing Internet facilities and the state-of-the-art literature in medical image indexing and multimedia information presentation. It also incorporates our current research in image retrieval and multimodal medical image fusion. It surpasses the existing systems in the commercial and research sectors as it provides convenient, efficient, effective, and flexible online processing, annotation, and multimodal querying capabilities in one forum. The patient confidentiality issue is well addressed when the sharing of the medical information is provided. This technology will assist medical practitioners/researchers by enabling efficient management and sharing of medical files within or across a community, without being subject to geographical restrictions an d without creating the problems of inconsistent and fragmented medical data.