COLLABORATIVE WORK WITH MEDICAL IMAGES IN A UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT - 3 PILOT PROJECTS

Medical care and research are highly specialised and distributed. Comp uter supported collaboration using local and wide area networks can es sentially help to bridge the communication gaps between the various ac tors in health care and medical research. Hereby the full integration of medical image data plays a key role due to the fact that most decis ions are made looking at images, e.g. an X-ray, an MRI, a photographic picture, an ECG curve and so on. In this paper three running pilot pr ojects are presented which implement and evaluate different kinds of c omputer supported collaboration at a university hospital with emphasis on medical images: (1) A medical informatics research and development collaboration in endoscopy between image analysis experts and clinici ans at different institutions. (2) A patient treatment collaboration b etween the physician at the nuclear reactor performing the radiation a nd the radiation planning experts at the Clinic of Radiation Therapy. (3) A medical research collaboration for acquisition of a second exper t opinion during a clinical study in order to improve the quality of t he study. The acceptance of these applications by the doctors in their research and clinical work is quite good. Their improvement requireme nts are objectives to already defined further projects.