Organisation, transmission, manipulation of pathological human organs on the WWW

The paper describes an integrated methodology for the development of a WWW computer system which addresses issues of the organisation, retrieval and manipulation of 3D volumetric models of pathological human organs. The library of organs is distributed on the WWW since medical expertise and needs are typically expensive resources and also because many pathological conditions are often restricted to local diffusion. Users are provided with a WWW viewer for interactive manipulation of the models of the organs. The system supports low-cost MS-Windows 32 platforms and requires no specialised hardware. Early results demonstrate that the compression techniques employed provide near real-time response for retrieval/manipulation, not only over high-speed expensive network lines, but also over low/medium network connections.