Hyperlinked Multimedia Medical Data

by Keith Jeffery

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The HYPERMEDATA Project (HYPERlinked Multimedia mEDical dATA) demonstrates cooperation between an European Union ERCIM Institute (CLRC) and an ERCIM member institute of a CEE country, namely Masaryk University, Institute of Computer Science within CRCIM. It brings together complementary skills in the two institutes together with Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) from Central and Eastern European countries. It is funded by the European Commission under the COPERNICUS scheme.

The major aim of the project is to provide informatic tools for the SMEs to utilise as high-value additions to the provision of Hospital Information Systems to the healthcare application area. In addition, there are possibilities to exploit the tools in other application areas. The additional facilities provided by the project will allow information exchange between heterogenous, distributed Hospital Information Systems thus helping in the care of patients as they are moved from hospital to hospital (eg to receive specialist treatment or care) and in utilising results of laboratory tests performed at hospitals other than the one where the patient is located.
The project has been structured to optimise the success of these aims. The many end-user / customer requirements can be condensed to two main problems:

• the integration of information from heterogeneous distributed sources
• its presentation to the end-user (both for output and input) through a hyperlinked multimedia document.

The technical aim of the project is to develop tools to solve these problems, using standards in both the distributed database and hyperdocument areas.

The overall workprogram consists of three major WorkPackages, each overlapping the next to ensure that there is suitable interaction between design derived from requirements with development based on design and in turn with evaluation by end-users.

At the mid-point of the 3-year project, the user requirements collection phase (mainly performed by T-Soft and AMIS) and the modelling and analysis work (mainly performed by CLRC and Masaryk University are completed, and the system specification and prototype are being finalised. An exploitation plan is being updated continuously as the market conditions and technical possibilities change.

The results to date consist of technical papers:

• Kohoutková, J., Jeffery, K.G.: Intelligent Hypermedia Access: The Universal Information-Space Guide. Proceedings of SOFSEM'94 Conference, Milovy, Czech Republic, November 1994. Ed. M. Bartosek, Masaryk University, Brno.
• Kohoutková, J., Sárek, M.: Projekt HYPERMEDATA: Hypermedialni prezentace integrovanych dat (Project HYPERMEDATA: Hypermedia Presentation of Integrated Data). Proceedings of MEDSOFT'95 Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, February 1995.
• Jeffery, K.G., Kohoutková, J.: HYPERMEDATA: Interoperability for Healthcare Systems. Proceedings of MBB'95 Slovakia, September 1995.
• Cook, S., Kohoutková, J., Jeffery, K.G.: HYPERMEDATA: Meta-structures for Exchanging Hypermedia Documents. Proceedings of ERCIM Database Workshop, Darmstadt, March 1996.

and Deliverables:

• D1.1 User requirements Report
• D1.2 Information and Process Model Specification D1.3 System Specification

Please contact:
Keith G Jeffery - CLRC
Tel: +44 235 44 6103
E-mail: kgj@inf.rl.ac.uk