Database and Collaboration System for Sharing Multimedia Medical Information

Abstract

 We have been developing a tele-health system to share medical and health information among medical facilities and institutions by utilizing multi-media information technologies. We completed a development of collaboration tool, termed MediaCollaborator, which enables sharing motion images as well as still images among two or more people over a TCP/IP network. This paper presents some issues of MediaCollaborator first and then explains our approach to them. We developed a method to overcome the issues and implemented it as two software components: (1) a database to manage files of motion and still images and other documents; (2) a server system to integrate the database and MediaCollaborator. We show how the components work with MediaCollaborator in detail. We are certain that our system is less expensive, portable, flexible to integrate other software and technologies, and easy to use.