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

["John C. Spinosa, MD, PhD" <john@spinosa.com>]

I would read this article with a grain of salt. The author entirely ignored
the use of notations in addressing this problem.

John

At 09:04 AM 7/30/98 -0400, Dean Bidgood wrote:
>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
>
>
>
>