[COAS-List] Fw: XML and New England Neurosurgery Network

["Dean Bidgood" <dbidgood@email.ouhsc.edu>]

Dear all,

Liora forwarded an interesting article (from Seybold online) to the list
yesterday. It's definitely worth your time to review it.

The author, Lisa Rein, briefly surveys 3 ways to handle binary data in XML
documents. One of the most interesting points is a quote from the featured
expert (Dr. Jonathan Borden, a New England MD/entrepreneur) who says, in
essence, that he is not interested in tagged "blobs" -- he wants an explicit
model of the kind that DICOM specifies. "I'm not so concerned with finding a
way to embed a link to an image in a web page as I am in standardizing on an
image format which maintains metadata. Bitmaps (gif and jpeg) don't. TIFF
and DICOM (Digital Image Communication in Medicine's standard medical
format) do." Then the article diverges from his point and focuses entirely
on the basics of tagging binary data in XML. Unfortunately, Ms. Rein does
not return to the critically important issue of the semantic data model
raised in the featured quote from Dr. Borden.

The article points out that XML needs to handle raster (2D array) data in
addition to text data for medical purposes. It doesn't mention
time-sequenced data (e.g. hemodynamic, electrophysiologic) nor other complex
datatypes whose nuances are likewise critical to the functionality required
in the medical domain (such as interfacing with existing systems mediated by
standards like HL7 and DICOM). The article does provide a good basic
overview of binary encoding strategies --- and it opens the door for more
specific exposition of the model and other pertinent data types, i.e. the
set of DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) observation classes, in future.

Thanks for catching this one, Liora. SGML SIG members have great potential
to make contributions in the area of multimedia reporting. For example, work
already accomplished by SIG members in last year's mammography reporting
demo would make a nice story for this same column in a future issue.

Best Regards to everyone,

Dean





-----Original Message-----
From: Liora Alschuler <Liora@The-Word-Electric.com>
To: sgml-hl7@dudley.mc.duke.edu <sgml-hl7@dudley.mc.duke.edu>
Cc: bidgood@nlm.nih.gov <bidgood@nlm.nih.gov>; mcolem@atl.com
<mcolem@atl.com>
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 1998 13:26
Subject: XML and New England Neurosurgery Network


>This article is about XML and binary data; the primary example used is for
>medical images.
>
>http://www.xml.com/xml/pub/98/07/binary/binary.html
>
>not quite sure what the DICOM ramifications are, will try to get more info,
>
>Liora