| SIAS main stream activity under this area is multimedia integration in medical environments. We have identified Neurophysiology as an excellent application domain to develop this area of research due to the different types of information used to reach diagnosis in this complex medical area. A comprehensive overview of this line of research can be found some of our papers. The experience acquired here can be generalised to other clinical areas, which face similar problems (Cardiology can be one example).
Other stream of activity we are active is the design and development of an HISA Compliant Middleware Platform. HISA (Hospital Information System Architecture) is a CEN standard on middleware architecture for communication among heterogeneous information systems in hospitals. This area of activity started historically at INESC in 1992 on project "Hospital 2000", a EC DGXIII ESPRIT special action, but was incorporated in our group only by 1997 based on our involvement on EC DGXIII TELEMATICS project "HANSA - Healthcare Advanced Networked System Architecture". Future work on this area is now concentrated at the conceptual approach to an "agent based" HISA compliant platform.
Other R&D effort has been aiming on the development of a methodology to optimise information workflows in Hospital environments. This was performed under the TeamHOS EC IST project.
In this line of research we are more recently promoting R&D for the implementation of a regional wide clinical communication network aimed at promoting web exchange of clinical episode summaries between the different clinical actors who participate in a patient clinical problem resolution. This has been performed under the RTS project (www.rtsaude.org).
Finally, the group is now engaged into bringing Grid Computing into health informatics. |
