INVESTIGATORS

Dr. Horace H S Ip, Dr. Ken C K Law, Mr. Chan Siu Lok

 

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

A multimedia medical document system architecture was designed. It supports three subsystems : a Database Server/Subsystem which provides retrieval and storage services for the whole system to deal with the physical database and hyperbase, an Authoring Subsystem which captures the media-nodes and defines hyperlinks, and a Presentation Subsystem which provides a window user interface for dealing with media-nodes and hyperlinks. A HyperDocument Interface idea is also introduced which allows subsystems independence. The rationale and background that led to its development would be discussed based on the investigation of current and future trends and standards of the multimedia technology, and also the practical handling of medical documents. Cardiac catheterization record (CCR) was chosen as the application domain because of its rich data set including textual data, hand-drawn operation sketches, electrographic (ECG) diagrams, radiographic images such as X-ray and video for the catheterization operation.

The CCR document was defined in Office Document Architecture (ODA) which showed its logical organization and also facilitated the multimedia document interchange. The CCR would be modeled as a hypermedia document. Each piece of monomedia data was considered as a simple media node, which can be further grouped to form composite nodes. To extend the functionality of the conventional hypermedia system to include active media such as video and sound, spatial-link and temporal-link are introduced to setup the spatial-temporal relationships between the media nodes and partial nodes. Windows metaphor and pseudo-object-oriented design was adopted in the design of HyperCardiac. A Media-Window Objects Hierarchy and the Media-Window Objects Mapping Mechanism were designed in the research which allows the media-node to be manipulated as objects in the Windows interface.

The system was implemented on PC Microsoft Windows environment which provides a Multimedia User Interface (MUI) for multimedia data visualization. The system demonstrates that the medical document system applications would no longer be limited to expensive workstations but now the small scale PC can provide a complete multimedia solution. The PC Windows environment provides good hooks to multimedia hardware and also multimedia platform for qualified medical data visualization making use the techniques such as Object-Linking-Embedding (OLE) and Media Control Interface (MCI). This system can be extended to a client/server distributed environment such as Windows NT.

 

FUNDING AGENCY

City University of Hong Kong

 

PUBLICATIONS

1. Ip, H.H.S., Chan, S.L. and Law, K.C.K., "Authoring Tools For Hypermedia Medical Record", Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, pp147-pp158, Singapore, November 1993.
2. Ip, H.H.S., Law, K.C.K. and Chan, S.L., "Multimedia Cardiac Catheterization Record Document System", Proceedings of The 8th World Congress on Medical Informatics, pp416-pp420, Vancouver, Canada, July 1995. Ip, H.H.S., Law, K.C.K., and Chan, S.L., "An Open Framework for a Multimedia Medical Document System", Journal of Microcomputer Applications, pp215-pp232, Vol. 18 No. 3. 1995.
3. Law, K.C.K., Ip, H.H.S., and Chan, S.L. "An Investigation of a Cost-effective Solution for Multimedia Medical Information Management", Information & Management, pp361-pp376, Vol. 28, No. 6, 1995.
4. Ip, H.H.S., Law, K.C.K. and Chan, S.L., "Multimedia Cardiac Catheterization Record Document System", Proceedings of The 8th World Congress on Medical Informatics, pp416-pp420, Vancouver, Canada, July 1995.

FIGURES OR IMAGES

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Figure 1 : Overview of Basic System Architecture for Multimedia Medical Document System

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Figure 2: : The Generic Logical Structure of a medical document (Cardiac Catherization Record)

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Figure 3 : Multiple Document Interface (MDI) of the multimedia medical docuent system