XML&CORBA-based distributed system for information integration and dissemination in multimedia neuroimaging applications

Medical information systems based in different hospital departments face tremendous difficulty in information exchange and dissemination due to the multitudes of hardware and software platforms running these systems. In this paper, we describe a distributed information system for integrating various hospital systems in supporting clinical neuroimaging research and epilepsy surgical planning. Our distributed information system uses a three-tiered architecture consists of a user-interface tier, application logic tier and data store tier. Two system implementations based on this software architecture but using different integration technologies were developed and are discussed in this paper: the XML (extensible Mark Up Language)-based implementation and the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)-based implementation. In the XML-based implementation, application logic tier communicates with user-interface tier and data store tier using HTTP and XML for data exchange. For the data exchange in CORBA-based implementation, the middleware uses HOP (Internet inter-ORB protocol) to call CORBA objects in the data store tier then to return the results to the user-interface tier. For the user-interface tier of either implementation, the Web browsers are served as clients to invoke application components or agents in the middleware. The application of the proposed distributed system allows clinical users to access, search and retrieve the multimedia information in any underlying computer systems with commonly used Web browsers. Preliminary results show that the system is effective for information integration and data sharing among the different departmental systems in the hospital for neuroimaging applications.