Fusing a systematic and a case-based repository for medical decision support.

In order to take full advantage of computer-based decision support in clinical practice, it makes sense to combine systems which support the same subject, but contribute to this task in different ways. At the Technical University of Munich, a Combined Clinical Decision Support System (C-CDSS) of this kind has been designed for gastroenterologists. The main goal of the system is to help the physicians in finding information which is relevant for making the right diagnoses or applying the proper therapy to his patients. To achieve this goal, not only systematic knowledge of the medical domain, but also case-based data is useful for a comparison of the actual case with well-documented similar cases of colleagues. The systematic knowledge comprises state-of-the-art textual information and selected multimedia contents in the sense of a standard textbook. The case-based information includes practice-related information on a pool of anonymized cases from clinical routine and also demonstrations of new techniques. By integrating these information resources into one service via a rule-based retrieval system, a powerful decision support system can be generated.

Interactive image processing as learning by doing component of a WBT application.

Web Based Training (WBT) is of increasing importance [1][2]. In [5] the main author has presented and discussed an overall approach to WBT for medical image processing. In the present contribution the interactive part of the approach is discussed in detail and its prototypical realisation in the framework of a client server teaching application is presented.

A new approach for integration of telemedicine applications into existing information systems in healthcare.

In order to take the full advantage of telemedicine applications, they must seamlessly be integrated into healthcare services and their information systems (e.g. HIS, POS, RIS). In our approach an HL7/XML-based integration module is used 1) to exchange documents with information systems; 2) to generate and administer documents internally; 3) to present documents. The module fills in pre-defined CDA-conforming XML templates with data from HL7 V2 messages. The approach is first applied to the teleconsultation service EST in the project ENDOTEL.