Aggregating and presenting multimedia medical data

Abstract

This paper discusses the aggregation and presentation of medical data in multimedia documents, based on the implementation of an application for generating and presenting ultrasound examination reports. The requirements for such an application and how a document architecture supporting document templates and hyperlinks helps meet these requirements are presented.

Full exploitation of the features offered by multimedia documents also depends on the surrounding technical infrastructure and work organization. To allow a controlled and synchronized development of these with the multimedia document application itself, the introduction of multimedia document support for isolated tasks is suggested as a first step.

Object-oriented techniques were used in all phases of the application development, and experience gained from this is presented. To increase readability to non-IT specialists the paper includes some introductory material on object-oriented methods and on document architectures.