Web-Based Remote Collaboration over Medical Image Using Web Services

There is great need to share the knowledge and experience among physicians on medical image analysis especially on the image of complex or rare diseases. In this paper,we take a stateful web services approach to build a medical image synchronously collaborative analysis system enables physicians doing synchronous collaborative analysis on medical image over geographic distances. Different from existed systems, we adopt shared-service based synchronous collaboration mode to achieve synchronous collaboration among collaboration clients which avoids transferring the medical image to all the collaboration clients and can share the high-performance computation power for medical image processing. We rank the users and the interactive operation events to avoid the event collision when two or more users operate the same medical image at approximately the same time. We also adopt the time-stamp based state update mechanism to keep the collaboration clients' state consistent with the collaboration server. For client side, we use Ajax-based rich web client to provide friendliness and platform-independent user interface to facilitate the use of our system. A prototype has been developed and shows the usefulness of our approach.