Tools
Multimedia database and distributed storage portal (MediaPort)
During the reporting period, we continued our development of a
web-based portal and a distributed storage server for multimedia
patient records and clinical research results. We have now implemented
a scalable system ("MediaPort") using Open Source technology (Apache
Web Server, mySQL Database, and JavaBeans, Java Server Pages and
Javascript for web application development).
Visualization Framework for medical informatics
During the reporting period, we continued our development of a software
framework for visualizing multi-media documents such as reports and
teaching files. We focused on the following: (1) we optimized the
framework for the new Java 1.4 toolkit to obtain excellent performance
on a wider variety of platforms (including Macintosh OSX); (2) we
extended the framework to use the Image I/O plugin architecture
available in Java 1.4, and we wrote file readers and writers for all of
the major image file formats; (3) we also extended the framework to
enable programmers to develop applications for authoring and
presentation of multi-media reports, conference summaries and teaching
files.
Our recent work on the framework was demonstrated at the annual meeting
of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in 2002, and the
software was described at the SPIE Medical Imaging Meeting in 2003
[Valentino, Wei, Ma and Neu, 2002; Neu, Valentino, et al, 2003]. In
addition, one of Dr. Valentino's students recently completed a Master's
Thesis in Biomedical Engineering on the development of the Composition
Toolkit and Multimedia Medical Documentation Format [Ma, 2003].
Examples of applications that were developed during the reporting
period using our Java Visualization Framework include a web-based
application for creating radiology teaching files [Shah, Valentino, Ma
and Hall, 2003], a flexible medical imaging viewer that was used in the
Urban Telemedicine Program [Valentino, Wei, Flowers, et al, 2002a;
Valentino, Wei, Flowers, et al, 2002b], and a portable application for
displaying structural and functional brain atlas data [Zhuang,
Valentino, et al, 2003].
