eIMES 3D mobile: A mobile application for diagnostic procedures

Computer based support for clinical and health-related procedures is growing in the last decades. However, the vast majority of information systems adopted in health structures are legacy systems, which do not often allow to export data easily and also are usually desktop oriented. A growing number of medical instruments are image-oriented and produce a large quantity of image data, typically in the DICOM format, which contain spatio-temporal features together with alpha-numeric information regarding patients. Dealing with this high-dimensional datasets is a complex and time-consuming task. In addition the diffusion of smartphones and tablets requires the development of technological features enabling the medical team to check on helthcare processes on-the-go and freely access and send image and data for case analysis and collaborative diagnostic. This paper presents eIMES 3D Mobile (standing for Evolution Imaging System 3D for Mobile), a system which is based on the eIMES 3D system and supports clinicians for images studies with dedicated functions for the mobile environment. The tool has been developed within a project called ReCaTuR for RAre Cancer Network (i.e., Network of Rare Cancer), aiming to define a network for the management, organization and distribution of medical information. Moreover, it has been implemented following the specifications by the oncology department of an Italian Hospital. eIMES 3D allows to start a medical interdisciplinary collaboration among different teams, geographically distributed in the network, so that obtaining the integration of skills, expertize, knowledge and experiences with the final aim of clinical case resolution. eIMES 3D provides an hardware infrastructure that allows to connect multiple devices, as well as to create workstations (WorkSpaces) that independently and asynchronously can request information to the central database containing the 3D imaging data. Il also allows to share information among a network of mobile devices. The ability to build plug-in modules enables to easily implement new features in eIMES 3D Mobile, thus ensuring its further development and its sustainability.