EC - Telematics Application Program MediMedia

The objective of the MEDIMEDIA project is to use the existing proposals of standards and the existing technology of the Internet to link together databases of medical images created by various projects dealing with medical images within the 4th Framework Program.

Medical imaging has become a major field of interest in healthcare over the last decade. Indeed, most of the diagnostic procedures used in daily practice produce images of different types and from different sources: medical imaging will become more and more multimodal.
On the other hand, a number of driving forces are pushing the medical community towards abetter integration of all the data related to one patient in a centralised folder and the development of adequate applications supporting an electronic integrated patient record isa key step for the future development of informatics for healthcare.
Thus, the possibility of integrating images from different sources in this patient recordis a mandatory step which requires a certain level of integration and/or interoperability between systems producing these images as well as standardisation of images formats and terminology. Within the 4th Framework Programme, Health Telematics Sector, several projects have been funded which deal with medical images and they will result in theimplementation of large databases of medical images: X-ray, endoscopy, pathology, CTscanner.
"Umbrella projects" are defined as large R&D projects that try to cluster the activity of various existing projects funded by the 4th Framework Programme in order to bring adapted solutions to questions of common interest.
This was thus a unique opportunity to develop informatics solutions integrating existing databases of medical images into a common search engine and providing innovative userinterfaces.
The MediMedia project is built upon the co-operation of 7 projects who have decided to produce a common search engine, interfacing to each of the existing databases and a new user interface based on 3-dimension technologies in order to allow the end user (the clinical practitioner) to access the information contained anywhere in the databases through a "one stop shopping" query process.
The project will also propose solutions that, in a further step, will be useful for integration of multimodal medical images into the patient folder.
By associating an important scientific publisher to the project, the output of it will also be exploited for education and documentation purposes, through both on- and off-line access.
This integration programme will be based on existing standards which will be reviewed extensively during the implementation phase. Thereby, the project will demonstrate the possibility of interoperability of databases of medical images and will propose andvalidate standards for image management and terminology.
Reports on the implementation of these standards will be forwarded to international organisations in charge of them and reinforce the presence of European partners in these regulatory bodies.