DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION CONSIDERATIONS OF A MULTIMEDIA MEDICAL DATABASE

Multimedia information management and communications systems for medic al applications have been undergoing design and development for more t han ten year now. The aim of these activities has been the development of distributed computer systems providing storage, processing, and co mmunication services required by the medical community. One of the mai n critical issues of such systems is the handling of multimedia inform ation (i.e., text, images, graphics, and voice) in a uniform way and t he fast access to images through the network. In this paper, we presen t the design architecture, concepts used in our multimedia database sy stem, along with its performance evaluation. The evaluation is focusse d on the response times of a multimedia medical database server, as se en by remote workstations for various retrieval and images transfer re quests. For this purpose, a queueing network model was developed and s imulated. Communications between the workstations and the database ser ver are governed by the client-server model using TCP/IP and appropria te application protocols on a 10 Mb/s Ethernet LAN.