Integration of interactive biomedical image data visualisation to Internet-based Personal Health Records for handheld devices

Modern medical practice gives rise to a significant volume of electronic data, and numerous online personal health record (PHR) banking services have emerged to satisfy the growing demand for self-management of this data. These services provide interoperable, centralized repositories that collect this data and make it ubiquitously accessible to patients, providers and referring practitioners by means of a variety of Internet-capable handheld devices. However, these Web-based PHRs currently offer very limited or no support for medical imagery. This is primarily attributed to the security concerns, heterogeneity in the data standards of medical images, and compatibility issues among target platforms. With ever increasing reliance on medical imaging data, the accessibility and interactive visualisation of said data are now becoming a fundamental requirement in PHRs. The aim of our study is to make biomedical image data available for use with handheld devices by means of such web-based PHR, so as to increase patients' access to their image data, and facilitate practitioner collaboration and review, without reducing the mobility that characterises these records. Our proposed system consists of a Web-based interface for the review of nuclear medicine imaging, in particular, dual-modality PET/CT images, on handheld devices, which is embedded within an online PHR, as well as a switchboard dispatch system that allows an archival image server (i.e., hospital information system) to respond securely to interactive visualisation requests made over the Internet. Our support for the complex and large data of dual-modal imaging ensures our work supports the latest in biomedical imaging standards. A key aspect of Internet-based systems is the importance of patient privacy and security issues. Our system uses industry-standard encryption and a remote-service architecture to address the perceived security limitations of PHR systems, and takes advantage of the same Web standards as the PHRs themselves to deliver a consistent user experience across all target platforms. Our experimental results suggest that by enabling PHRs to propagate medical image data to Internet capable devices, our system can potentially improve the utility of health record banking.