EUROMED — A 21st century WWW-based telemedical information society

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming one of the most important ways to access information. Also, the concept of telemedicine captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementation, especially if it is combined with the growth of the internet and WWW, however there is a need for standards. The EC supported Euromed project is therefore developing a standardised telemedical information system for 21^st century healthcare, called “Virtual Medical Worlds” that uses hypergraphics and hypertext to homogeneously access patient medical data and Java to initiate, manipulate and interact with reconstructed 3D/4D and VR models. This paper presents the navigational aspects of Virtual Medical Worlds and the concept of Web-based telemedical services which can run locally within a hospital or remotely to support a global uniform level of healthcare, for example High Performance Computing could be provided as a remote service. Additional to Virtual Medical Worlds, the Euromed project defines, as presented in this paper, the foundational building blocks of a 21^st century telemedical information society.