A user-centered cooperative information system for medical imaging diagnosis

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is one of the most promising technologies aimed to assist medical users located in different clinical sites to access distributed medical imaging information. This article presents a cooperative information system intended for remote medical imaging diagnosis. The main general CSCW problems addressed here are as follows: 1) At a conceptual level: The definition of a procedure for the design of user-centered cooperative systems; and 2) at a technological level: The improvement of user feedback and the optimization of the communication bandwidth in highly interactive CSCW applications for remote access to medical image databases. These technological goals are achieved by developing two main components: A CSCW distributed architecture for synchronous cooperative work and a DICOM medical image database management system. A cooperative system in the field of cardiac angiography images has allowed us to test and validate the user-centered design procedures and the CSCW architectures implemented. Finally, a discussion of experience of the user-centered design and of the implementation of cooperative information systems is also presented.