IBMAS: An Internet Based Medical Archive System

This paper presents an Internet-Based Medical Archive System, thus called IBMAS. IBMAS is a prototype system of a proposed paradigm of research aiming at building up a distributed archival system over the Internet to facilitate medical practitioners for maintaining, sharing, updating, searching, and processing medical information conveniently and consistently. IBMAS differs from the existing systems in the sense that it not only offers a full spectrum of online communications, processing, and annotation tools, but also provides powerful multimodal search functionalities to the users. In addition, the database is always kept in a “live” mode such that information contributed by users is periodically indexed. At this time of publication, a preliminary version of IBMAS containing over 2000 medical images in different modalities along with associated annotation text for each of the images is fully implemented and is in evaluation.