The importance of developing a support system for medical decision-making in the clinical field has been pointed out in order to improve accuracy and objectivity of the judgment of clinician, and to detect early the disease. Various attempts on clinical diagnosis support have been done in the literature, e.g., rule-based production system, analysis of ECG or the image, focusing on only specific diseases, so those can not utilized for the general internal medicine diagnosis support. In this paper, it is noticed that signs, symptoms, clinical laboratory data such as blood and biochemical check up data are essential information which show functional depression and failure of the ecosystem, and a practical software system providing the physicians with clues to clinical diagnosis. First, after analysis of the medical task and structuralization of information from the patient, the medical modeling method is provided, and it is indicated that diagnosis can be considered the identification of patient who corresponds to the controlled object. Secondly, by the concept of patient model and disease model, the system identification algorithm is proposed, and actual system constructed for the medical diagnosis is described. The diagnaccuracy of this system using data from medical journal case report became 82.6%. Also, utilization example to the early diagnosis and utilization example of the disease in which the crisis frequency is low are given, and the results shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

 Genetic analysis of fetal tissues permits us to investigate the etiology of unidentified fetal diseases that may be caused by various genetic and environment factors. We are constructing a database based on such analysis and deposit abnormal fetal tissues to the DNA bank according to the Ethical Principles of Research on the Human Genome from the Japanese Government and other guidelines. A researcher joined in this project is requested to be reviewed by the Ethic Committee. This database can be accessed by each member of perinatal physicians and genome researchers via Web browser. A physician can put patient information into this database via browser after obtaining informed consent and send the tissue sample to the bank. A researcher can also put the result of gene analysis into the database. To secure the access, the ISDN network with callback is developed. Accumulation of these data will be an important initial step for the analysis of fetal diseases. Currently we have data records of 164 patients and their 626 specimens.

 In this paper, we propose a method to index for present condition of utilizing information technology of prefectural medical associations. Additionally, we report, as a case study, the results of the application of the proposed method to survey and analysis of Hokkaido Medical Associations and indexing them.

 The method involves surveying the present situation of each medical association in terms of the three points of view, i.e., infrastractures (I), skill (S) and mind (M). We propose four indices to verify the present situation of medical associations, i.e., ISM index, ISM±index, l-u index and l-u ratio index.

 The proposed method was applied to carry out survey of Hokkaido Medical Associations. The result reveals wide applicabilty of the method.

 The authors previously developed the tele-rehabilitation support system. Occupational therapists (OT) and Physical therapists (PT) reported that the system was useful for supporting general rehabilitation training. However, they also pointed out its insufficiency in recovery evaluation, because of the incapability of motion angle detection. Therefore we have developed a new method for a motion angle measuring system from training tele-video images with a one camera imaging system, in order to evaluate the rehabilitation outcome.

 Our method consists of six steps of image processing, Discriminant Analysis Binarization, Hilditch Thinning, Hough Transform, Cluster Analysis and Angle Detection. This sequential processing automatically detects both centerlines of forearm (basic axis) and of hand (movement axis), which made a centerline in the hand. Also, this basic axis and the movement axis were classified by cluster analysis.

 The result shows the new method has enough capabilities to detect the range of motion in training-effect with precision. We concluded that this method will be very useful for tele-rehabilitation, when angle detection errors in this method are finely corrected.

 In this report, we assessed the impact of user interface for the all-digital system with secure communication in a practical health examination center. The data amounts of communication are about 2 times larger than the non-secure case because of the encryption and the authentication. However, using the multi-task parallel processing and the IC smart card as a private key, we showed that the enduser did not notice the difference of response through questionnaires. In addition, this report discusses some problems of user interface, for example, the GUI of mouse and icon could not always support speedy operations and too much simplification of operation would cause the learning difficulty.

 Nowadays, some code systems of diagnostic terms are available, but these are developed for the use in medical institutions, not in dental ones. Diagnostic terms of maxillo-facial diseases and oral manifestations of other diseases are widely scattered among a large volume of such code sets, in addition, specific terms of dental and oral diseases are often not covered. We tried to extract the records of terms from the standard set, provided by Medical Information Developing Center, by applying the code system of ICD-DA to the set. We also tried to rearrange these records by comparing with the master table provided by the Dental Hospital of Osaka University, which was also coded in accordance with ICD-10. All terms from the two sets are arranged in one tabular list for precise comparison. Authors believe that our findings and tabular list are useful and basic material for developing a new set of diagnostic terms for dentistry.

 Recently, the rapid spread of information technology (IT) made it general to use Internet (IN) in medical area. However in Japan, Web-based information has been virtually free from any regulations or evaluations that the usefulness of IN as a presenting tool of a secondary source is not clear. Thus we examined convenience and reliability of IN through actual retrieval of medical information for specialists. We performed experimental retrieval on the assumption that we faced with a situation to frame a medication guideline for elderly with myocardial infarction. Information retrieval performed by using 6 kinds of search engines and 4 terms. Consequently, instead of careful selection of SE and terms for retrieval, there were plenty of inappropriate or redundant sites (noise) in results. Moreover, there was a problem also in the reproducibility of reference. In addition, the Web-sites without the clear statement of four items: “producer’s name,” “information basis,” “creation date or revised date,” and “references” of the site occupied 75%. On the other hand, the site offered medical information with four items occupied less than 10% of all. As mentioned above, at least in collection of special medical information, IN should be used after understanding this fact in clinical practical use because the convenience of the IN is still low and it is difficult to judge informational reliability in many Websites.