THE CREATION OF A 21ST-CENTURY TELEMEDICAL INFORMATION-SOCIETY

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the k inds of ''information highways'' and ''information societies'' that ar e now being visualised. The concept of telemedicine captures much of w hat is developing in terms of technology implementations, especially i f it is combined with the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web (W WW). It is foreseen that the WWW will become the most important commun ication medium of any future information society. If the development o f such a society is to be on a global scale, it should not be allowed to develop in an ad hoc manner. For this reason, the EC ISIS'95 suppor ted Euromed project has identified 20 building blocks resulting in 39 steps requiring multi-disciplinary collaborations. Since, the organisa tion of information is critical especially when concerning healthcare the Euromed project has also introduced a new (global) standard called ''Virtual Medical Worlds'' which provides the potential to organize e xisting medical information and provide the foundations for its integr ation into future forms of medical information systems. Virtual Medica l Worlds, based on 3D reconstructed medical models, utilises the WWW a s a navigational medium to remotely access multi-media medical informa tion systems. The visualisation and manipulation of hyper-graphical 3D ''body/organ'' templates and patient-specific 3D/4D/and VR models is an attempt to define an information infrastructure in an emerging WWW- based telemedical information society. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.