Algorithms and heuristics for efficient medical information display in PDA

Accessing medical information in mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones is becoming widespread. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities as of desktop computers, it is necessary for medical information to be fragmented for proper presentation on these types of devices. In this paper, we propose an architecture for displaying medical information in PDA. In the proposed system, a server extracts the information, categorizes the information in order of its relevance for diagnosis, and dynamically generates a hierarchical view of the relevant information based on certain medical domain knowledge. Displaying image and graphics data in PDA poses several challenges. The proposed system supports an image visualization tool, which interactively displays an image or a portion of an image in user's PDA. This visualization tools increases the resource utilization of PDA by offloading a part of the computation to the server. A suitable caching scheme is incorporated for optimum utilization of communication channel bandwidth.