The trend towards DBMS in the 1970's and the development of MUMPS as a user and problem oriented programming language for data management in health care environment are discussed, putting the needs for the two in contrast.
Stress is laid on the facts that clinical knowledge on individual patient is best created through tireless and repetitive inquiry mediated by MUMPS interaction with history data-base, and that the hierarchical sparse array technique of MUMPS is well suited for recording and recalling patient histories, analytical data, and tables of diagnostic codes. The growth and activities of the MUMPS User's Groups (U. S., Europe and Japan) and the achievements of the MUMPS Development Committee are detailed.
The MUMPS Standard is introduced in some detail. Creation of Kana character handling syntax is the top priority in the implementation of MUMPS Standard in Japan. Possible future MUMPS implementations and development of MUMPS environment in small and large scale institutions including microprocessors are reviewed on the basis of current literatures.

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Computer image processing techniques are applied to the radioisotope (RI) angiocardiographic left ventricular images.
In clinical medicine, the shape and dimensions of the left ventricle have been shown to provide many types of important information for the evaluation of the cardiac functions. Various techniques for this measurement have been devised. Recently, the RI-angiocardiography has come to be widely used, because it is superior to conventional X-ray method in its non-invasiveness.
However, images obtained by this method are usually quite noisy and poor in quality. It will be quite valuable for clinical use to apply the computer image processing technique to this image and to facilitate the extraction of features such as the left ventricular volume.
In this paper, properties of the RI-angiocardiographic image and several problems for the computer processing are first described. Then, processing techniques for the left ventricular boundary extraction are discussed. Two methods are introduced. One employs a radial scan and an ideal density curve fitting technique, the other employs a boundary tracing algorithm using the nonlinear edge enhancement technique. These methods have proved to work fairly well to locate boundaries in such a noisy image as RI-angiocardiogram.

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A radiographic system using on-line computer control of x-ray microbeam scan, which has been developed recently by the present authors, provides effective means for the selective exposures of the specified sample points on the object, and quantitative measurements of the transmitted x-ray intensities. The system also makes it possible to trace an outline of the object or to track a point on a moving organ.
Present paper describes an interactive display terminal of the scanned x-ray image, which has been developed for assisting the computer measurements through visual inspections of the x-ray image. For the preliminary observation of the object, a low exposure x-ray image by the x-ray microbeam scan is recorded using a scan converter tube and displayed on a TV-monitor. A cross mark is displayed, superposed upon the x-ray image, to specify the selected position on theobject. Location of the cross is controlled by manual switches and the coordinate values are read into the computer. Computer exposes sample points at selected position and records spatio-temporal variations of the x-ray intensities. It has been deaionstrated that the method is useful for the observations of the movements of organs including pulsating movements of the cardiac wall. Present system has also been applied successfully to the automatic tracing of a selected portion of the outline of the organ such as a barium meal full stomach.

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The magnetic field produced by the heart receives two contributions from the cardiac generators. The first is from the current generated in the surrounding volume conductor by the cardiac generators, and the second is from the cardiac generators themselves. For some special shapes of volumeconductor, however, one or more of the magnetic field components receives zero net contribution from the volume conductor current, and therefore, are entirely due to the current generators.
The normal component of magnetic field on the chest, due to the heart, would be large part produced directly by the cardiac generators. The measurement of this magnetic field component allows great simplification in the solution of the inverse problem.

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