A TELEMEDICINE DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM FOR COOPERATIVE MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS

Telemedicine is changing the classical form of health care delivery, d ramatically increasing the number of new applications in which some ty pe of distributed synchronous cooperation between health care professi onals is required. This paper presents the design and development of a telemedicine distributed system for cooperative medical diagnosis bas ed on two new approaches: 1) a distributed layered architecture specia lly designed to add synchronous computer supported cooperative work fe atures either to new or existing medical applications; 2) the definiti on of a methodological procedure to design graphical user interfaces f or telemedicine cooperative working scenarios. The cooperative work is supported by a collaborative toolkit that provides telepointing, wind ow sharing, coordination and synchronization. Finally, we have impleme nted and installed the telemedicine system in clinical practice betwee n two hospitals, providing teleconferencing facilities for cooperative decision support in haemodynamics studies. This specific implementati on and a preliminary evaluation were accomplished under the Research P roject FEST ''Framework for European Services in Telemedicine'' funded by the EU AIM Programme.