Recently, much attention has been focused on multimedia information systems. The object-oriented database system is considered as a possible candidate for constructing multimedia information systems because of its modeling power, and encapsulation capability. In a medical environment, various multimedia information is represented and utilized as medical technologies and appliances are developed. In this thesis, we propose a medical multimedia data model based on the object-oriented database system. The thesis focuses on the efficient sharing of large multimedia data and the systematic management of medical multimedia data.
The meta class concept is proposed to manipulate medical multimedia data at the meta level. There are two major meta classes for derivation and replication of multimedia data. In addition, we also provide the folder class which is a sub-class of the medical-application meta class. The folder class is very useful for supporting multimedia data consistently and representing a hierarchical data structure of patient information. Moreover, we designed and implemented the proposed modeling features using the UniSQL/X object-oriented database management system on a Sun Sparc workstation.
