Data processing and presentation for a personalised, image-driven medical graphical avatar

With the continuing digital revolution in the healthcare industry, patients are being confronted with the difficult task of managing their digital medical data. Current personal health record (PHR) systems are able to store and consolidate this data, but they are limited in providing tools to facilitate patients' understanding and management of the data. One reason for this stems from the limited use of contextual information, especially in presenting spatial details such as in volumetric images and videos, as well as time-based temporal data. Further, lack of meaningful visualisation techniques exist to represent the data stored in PHRs. In this paper we propose a medical graphical avatar (MGA) constructed from whole-body patient images, and a navigable timeline of the patient's medical records. A data mapping framework is presented that extracts information from medical multimedia data such as images, video and text, to populate our PHR timeline, while also embedding spatial and textual annotations such as regions of interest (ROIs) that are automatically derived from image processing algorithms. We developed a prototype to process the various forms of PHR data and present the data in a graphical avatar. We analysed the usefulness of our system under various scenarios of patient data use and present preliminary results that indicate that our system performs well on standard consumer hardware.