IBMAS: an Internet Based Medical Archive System

Presents IBMAS (Internet-Based Medical Archive System). IBMAS is a prototype system of a proposed research paradigm aiming at building up a distributed archival system over the Internet to facilitate medical practitioners to maintain, share, update, search and process medical information conveniently and consistently. IBMAS differs from existing systems in the sense that it not only offers a full spectrum of online communications, processing and annotation tools, but also provides powerful multi-modal search functionalities to the users. In addition, the database is always kept in a "live" mode such that information contributed by users is periodically indexed. A preliminary version of IBMAS containing over 2,000 medical images in different modalities along with associated annotation text for each of the images has been fully implemented and is under evaluation.