Integrating DICOM medical images into Virtual Medical Worlds

Virtual Medical Worlds (VMW) represents a new standard for integrating together medical information that may reside at several different locations, be of many different modalities, and adapt automatically to new information. A particularly important source of medical information is medical images, nowadays mostly stored in DICOM databases. We present and demonstrate an integrated system that allows Web-based access to DICOM images from the Virtual Medical Worlds interface, and that provides for semi-automatic incorporation of new image information into the VMW template, as soon as the images are entered into the DICOM database.