Learning to take your Virtual Medicine

EUROMED Project Manager, Andrew Marsh, from the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens, is enthusiastic now the project has reached its halfway stage. He suggests that healthcare is a major candidate for improvement within the vision of the information highway.

First, the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are extremely useful tools for providing the potential to reduce European geographical disparity, and to communicate medical practices.

Secondly, a variety of computing platforms guarantees the enhancement of sophisticated software packages for imaging techniques developed in a Visualization Suite. This is the responsibility of the so-called meta-centre established by EUROMED and containing four HPC centres, namely NTUA (Greece), University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), University of Calabria (Italy) and University of Joensuu (Finland).

Thirdly, there is the newly emerging structure of the medical world consisting of specialized clinics, general hospitals and local doctors which can collaborate and facilitate a uniform level of medical practice.

The creation of Virtual Worlds
On the technical level, the EUROMED computer specialists have been working with two kinds of standards to create a protocol for image visualization. Both languages form the basis of the revolutionary Virtual Medical Worlds enabling a profound and detailed medical diagnosis of a particular patient. The VRML 2.0 standard allows for a graphical world to be annotated with hyperlinks to other Worlds and digitized images and is thus functioning as a bridge representing the 'tele' traffic within the information society.

The Dicom 3.0 standard supports the notion of visualizing varying image modalities in a uniform format and is therefore handling the medical part of the telemedicine business. Connection and fusion of both these standards through the internet is opening up a fascinating world to the local physician. He has only to put the raw medical data from his patient on the World Wide Web to compare them with the derived medical data, such as diagnostic reports, stored in multi-media databases in specialized clinics, as well as with the reconstructed medical data consisting of computer generated models to be found on the WWW-server.

All the specialized consulting in order to help his patient takes place within the Virtual Medical Worlds of the World Wide Web where all the necessary details to sort out the medical problem are put together in text and images, helped by the high performance computing centres.

The story continues...
Andrew Marsh is also planning a pilot hospital demonstration in the autumn, 1998, in the University Hospital Leiden to present a lively view on the concepts of the telemedical information society.

The benefits of telemedicine seem to be unlimited for those who are willing to enter the universe of a well launched project combining idealistic dreams with practical and scientific reality.

Check in at the Euromed web site to see the Virtal Medical Worlds coming alive.