CIAS - achieving interoperability using CORBA

This paper presents one of the efforts of the Heart Institute of Sao Paulo for the development of a distributed system for retrieving and research of medical images and medical information. The objective is the implementation of an open architecture based on the Clinical Image Access Service (CIAS) specification, defined by the Object Management Group, which allows the recover of meta-data and relevant information for general practioners and clinical specialists in a multi-platform, distributed environment. The CIAS-InCor was developed in Java language, to achieve multi-platform capability, together with CORBA. The images are received in DICOM format, being stored into relational database for the recover of meta-information through the CIAS specification. A prototype of a CIAS server and client were designed and implemented. It has been possible to recover images and clinical information from the CIAS server in a distributed, non-homogenous environment with success. Through the use of standards and new technologies the Heart Institute of Sao Paulo is reaching a high level of integration between systems and equipments and going towards the development of a complete electronic medical record. The CIAS is still an unfinished specification with good points like interoperability and weaknesses like the lack of semantics between exchanged data.