Data processing and presentation for a personalised, image-driven medical graphical avatar.

With the continuing digital revolution in the healthcare industry, patients are being confronted with the difficult task of managing their digital medical data. Current personal health record (PHR) systems are able to store and consolidate this data, but they are limited in providing tools to facilitate patients' understanding and management of the data. One reason for this stems from the limited use of contextual information, especially in presenting spatial details such as in volumetric images and videos, as well as time-based temporal data.

A patient-centric distribution architecture for medical image sharing.

Over the past decade, rapid development of imaging technologies has resulted in the introduction of improved imaging devices, such as multi-modality scanners that produce combined positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) images. The adoption of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) in hospitals have dramatically improved the ability to digitally share medical image studies via portable storage, mobile devices and the Internet. This has in turn led to increased productivity, greater flexibility, and improved communication between hospital staff, referring physicians, and outpatients.

A web-based image viewer for multiple PET-CT follow-up studies.

There exist many viewers for single-modal medical images that are efficient and are equipped with powerful analysis tools. However, there is a distinct lack of efficient image viewers for multi-modality images, particularly for displaying multiple follow-up studies that depict a patient's response to treatment over time. Such viewers would be required to display large amounts of image data.

SparkMed: a framework for dynamic integration of multimedia medical data into distributed m-Health systems.

With the advent of 4G and other long-term evolution (LTE) wireless networks, the traditional boundaries of patient record propagation are diminishing as networking technologies extend the reach of hospital infrastructure and provide on-demand mobile access to medical multimedia data. However, due to legacy and proprietary software, storage and decommissioning costs, and the price of centralization and redevelopment, it remains complex, expensive, and often unfeasible for hospitals to deploy their infrastructure for online and mobile use. This paper proposes the SparkMed data integration framework for mobile healthcare (m-Health), which significantly benefits from the enhanced network capabilities of LTE wireless technologies, by enabling a wide range of heterogeneous medical software and database systems (such as the picture archiving and communication systems, hospital information system, and reporting systems) to be dynamically integrated into a cloud-like peer-to-peer multimedia data store.