THE COMPONENT-BASED ARCHITECTURE OF THE HELIOS MEDICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

The constitution of highly integrated health information networks and the growth of multimedia technologies raise new challenges for the dev elopment of medical applications. We describe in this paper the genera l architecture of the HELIOS medical software engineering environment devoted to the development and maintenance of multimedia distributed m edical applications. HELIOS is made of a set of software components, f ederated by a communication channel called the HELIOS Unification Bus. The HELIOS kernel includes three main components, the Analysis-Design and Environment, the Object Information System and the Interface Mana ger. HELIOS services consist in a collection of toolkits providing the necessary facilities to medical application developers. They include Image Related services, a Natural Language Processor, a Decision Suppo rt System and Connection services. The project gives special attention to both object-oriented approaches and software re-usability that are considered crucial steps towards the development of more reliable, co herent and integrated applications.