The establishment of a common Web-based framework for telemedical interaction

The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming one of the most important ways to access information and promote interaction. Also, the concept of telemedicine captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementation, especially if it is combined with the growth of the Internet and WWW. However, there is a need for standards. A standardised telemedical information system is being developed by the EC supported EUROMED project, for a 21^st century healthcare environment. The proposed standard is called “Virtual Medical Worlds” which uses hypergraphics and hypertext to homogeneous access patient medical data and Java to initiate manipulate and interact with reconstructed 3D/4D and VR models. Various applications are provided through local and remote services. This paper presents the infrastructure aspects of Virtual Medical Worlds that allows Web-based telemedical services to be run locally within a hospital or remotely to support a global uniform level of healthcare