Web hospital information system for image guided procedures

A complete Web based hospital information system, which can allow medical doctors to access and modify patient information and records anywhere in the world via the Internet, was developed. More specifically, this Web information system can be linked seamlessly to our fully computerized MR image-guided neurosurgery suite. This information system, which utilizes the unprecedented Internet infrastructure and adopts the most updated software technologies, addresses the urgent need for handling today's hospital information flow and management. With this new information system in our surgery suite, images and records that have been transferred directly from a diagnostic system such as MR, CT, etc. to the DICOM archive are accessible via a secured Interact connection. When data is accessed via the Web, it can be retrieved in several formats, including raw DICOM and binary, which are extremely useful for various research and development purposes, as well as new applications that require access to the original image data. The Interact-based Web Hospital Information System (WHIS) can easily match the existing standards for this type of information system in a hospital, and can accommodate any anticipated requirements for image-guided minimally invasive surgery in the future. A practical and potentially low cost Web Hospital information system, which is functionality-driven, will be presented in this paper. It provides an extremely intuitive interactive environment, as well as a very user-friendly interface for use by both medical doctors and patients. In our prototype software, a number of development tools such as Microsoft™ VB and VC++ have been used. For actual data storage, software using a more efficient approach for data storage of an enormous scale, SENCOR™ Storage Server (SSS), has been adopted. The strategy for supporting individualized services in the WHIS will be discussed, and components used in the system will be presented.