Flexible frameworks for medical multimedia

Abstract

The next generation of medical systems will integrate multimodality and multimedia data from a variety of sources to aid individual ysicians in providing the best treatment and care for their patients and to help researchers understand patterns of disease in collections of large databases. We promote a principle of maximum flexibility for the design of these systems to accommodate new developments in medical imaging and bioinformatics. We present several characteristics of flexible systems that support medical multimedia. We illustrate how these characteristics can be applied within diverse medical research and clinical therapy environments through two in-depth case studies. Within these examples, we describe how specific emerging technologies, including the semantic web and publish and subscribe networking, can enhance the flexibility of medical multimedia architectures.