Author(s): Gayathri V, Priyadarsini K
The healthcare industry has begun to utilize web-based systems and cloud computing infrastructure to develop and creasing array of online personal health record (PHR) systems. Although these systems provide the technical capacity to store and retrieve medical data in various multimedia formats, including images, ideas, voice, and text, individual patient use remains limited by the lack of intuitive data representation and visualization techniques. As such, further research is necessary to better visualize and present these records, in ways that make the complex medical data more intuitive. In this study, we present a web-based PHR visualization system, called the 3D medical graphical avatar (MGA), which was designed to explore web-based delivery of a wide array of medical data types including multidimensional medical images; medical videos; text-based data; and spatial annotations. Mapping information was extracted from each of the data types and was used to embed spatial and textual annotations, such as regions of interest (ROIs) and time-based video annotations. Our MGA itself is built from clinical patient imaging studies, when available. We have taken advantage of the emerging web technologies of HTML5 and WebGL to make our application available to a wider base of users and devices. We analyzed the performance of our proof-of-concept prototype system on mobile and desktop consumer devices. Our initial experiments indicate that our system can render the medical data in a fashion that enables interactive navigation of the MGA