MILORD: Multimedia Interaction with Large Object-oriented Radiological and clinical Databases
Contract Information
Programme: THIRD FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME Programme Acronym: AIM Contract Type: NO CONTRACT TYPE Start Date: 1992-01-01 End Date: 1995-06-30 Contract No: N/A Role for TUC/MUSIC: Contractor Funding for TUC/MUSIC: 1100000.0 Euros Principal Investigator for TUC/MUSIC: Stavros Christodoulakis
Project Information
Project Description
The project aimed at designing and implementing a prototype system (MILORD) able to handle in an effective way multimedia medical records, which represent an integrated view of patient's data. MILORD acted as a "glue", binding together the different information sources (administrative vs clinical data, pictorial and textual vs structured data etc.) in order to improve the quality of medical diagnosis in the real clinical environment. It supported a departmental environment, in which the medical staff can manage directly all the information involved in a specific department, as well as access the information provided from other departments. Typically, MILORD supports a federation of autonomous subsystems, each of which is composed of a multiprocessor server, a number of workstations and interfaces to information sources and medical equipment. MILORD users are allowed to co-operate and share the same patient data in a real-time co-operative work mode supported by a teleconferencing module. The project concerned the storage, retrieval, communication and processing of heterogeneous multimedia clinical information in an integrated environment. Advanced technologies were exploited, such as: new knowledge representation tools, advanced human computer interaction, 3-dimensional graphical processing of medical images, high performance parallel architecture and algorithms, large scale distributed data storage, cooperative environment for clinical applications. Since considerable attention was given to the large health care European market, the project developed precompetitive prototypes of industrial products. The MILORD system was implemented by exploiting the KIWIS (ESPRIT Project 2424) system as follows: firstly, the advanced graphical user interface design system has being customised and enriched for taking into account the multimedia interaction requirements specific for the medical application; secondly, the knowledge representation and manipulation language (LOCO) has being enriched in several directions in order to manage multimedia objects and also to meet the requirements of medical applications; thirdly, the Cooperation manager has being extended to support a MILORD federation, which also includes teleconferencing facilities; lastly, the main-memory resident DBMS has being substantially modified to become an efficient multimedia object manipulation and storage server. Summarizing, the major technological extensions to KIWIS that have being carried out in MILORD were: multimedia capabilities, management of large and heterogeneous storage devices, interactive 2D/3D graphics, adoption of a server-clients architecture, exploitation of parallel computing equipment. From its first version, MILORD was installed for testing in Radiological and Surgical departments of large hospitals of different European countries. The evaluation was carried out during the routine use in diagnostic and therapeutic activity. The clinical data processed at the multimedia workstation will involve several different types of patients and diseases in order to test the prototype in multiple ways. All the staff working with the system were repeatedly asked to answer questionnaires concerning the functionality and the efficacy of the system.
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