THE CREATION OF A GLOBAL TELEMEDICAL INFORMATION-SOCIETY

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the k inds of 'information highways' and 'information societies' that are no w being visualized. The medical information management market is one o f the largest and fastest growing segments of the healthcare device in dustry. The expected revenue by the year 2000 is US$21 billion. Teleme dicine currently accounts for only a small segment but is expanding ra pidly. In the USA more than 60% of federal telemedicine projects were initiated in the last 2 years. The concept of telemedicine captures mu ch of what is developing in terms of technology implementations, espec ially if it is combined with the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). It is foreseen that the World Wide Web (WWW) will become t he most important communication medium of any future information socie ty. If the development of 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 Euromed Project has identified 20 building blocks resulting in 3 9 steps requiring multi-disciplinary collaborations. Since, the organi zation of information is therefore critical especially when concerning healthcare the Euromed Project has also introduced a new (global) sta ndard called 'Virtual Medical Worlds' which provides the potential to organize existing medical information and provide the foundations for its integration into future forms of medical information systems. Virt ual Medical Worlds, based on 3D reconstructed medical models, utilizes the WWW as a navigational medium to remotely access multi-media medic al information systems. The visualization and manipulation of hyper-gr aphical 3D body/organ' templates and patient-specific 3D/4D/and VR mod els is an attempt to define an information infrastructure in an emergi ng WWW-based telemedical information society. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scienc e Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.