A Web Information System for medical image management

In the last years, the use of digital images for medical diagnosis and research has increased considerably. For this reason, it is necessary to develop new and better applications for managing in an effective way a large amounts of medical information. DICOM is the standard for the Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine. However, DICOM information is difficult to interchange and integrate out of the scope of medical specialized equipment. This drawback make difficult its use and its integration in a wide context as the Web. XML is the standard for the information exchange and data transportation between multiple applications. As the XML databases are emerging like the best alternative to storage and manage XML documents, in this work we present a Web Information System to store, in an integrated way, DICOM and Analyze 7.5 files in an XML Database. For its development, the XML schemas for both DICOM and Analyze 7.5 formats have been obtained and the architecture for the integration of XML documents in the XML DB has been defined.