Case-based support in a cooperative medical diagnosis environment

Many medical services are often not available to people living in remote areas because of the lack of medical specialists. This problem would be alleviated if a suitable environment was designed to allow physicians to collaborate and exchange ideas with centrally located medical specialists. This article describes an ongoing research project to design and implement a collaborative multimedia environment to allow medical specialists to cooperate in diagnosis. The environment will support remote database access for medical images, the retrieval of relevant medical cases to support diagnosis, and communication among participants through telepointers and image annotation by free-hand drawing.