The creation of a 21st century telemedical information society

• Published in: Future generation computer systems Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 3 - 22
• Main Author: Marsh, Andy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.06.1998
• Subjects: Health care; Information society; Interactive computer systems; Medical applications; Medical computing; Telemedicine; Three dimensional computer graphics; Virtual reality; Wide area networks; World Wide Web; Telemedicine; Information society; World Wide Web
• ISSN: 0167-739X; 1872-7115
• DOI: 10.1016/S0167-739X(98)00005-3

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the kinds of “information highways” and “information societies” that are now being visualised. The concept of telemedicine captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementations, especially if it is combined with the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). It is foreseen that the WWW will become the most important communication medium of any future information society. If the development of such a society is to be on a global scale, it should not be allowed to develop in an ad hoc manner. For this reason, the EC ISIS'95 supported Euromed project has identified 20 building blocks resulting in 39 steps requiring multi-disciplinary collaborations. Since, the organisation of information is critical especially when concerning healthcare the Euromed project has also introduced a new (global) standard called “Virtual Medical Worlds” which provides the potential to organize existing medical information and provide the foundations for its integration into future forms of medical information systems. Virtual Medical Worlds, based on 3D reconstructed medical models, utilises the WWW as a navigational medium to remotely access multi-media medical information systems. The visualisation and manipulation of hyper-graphical 3D “body/organ” templates and patient-specific 3D/4D/and VR models is an attempt to define an information infrastructure in an emerging WWW-based telemedical information society.