This book has been mainly written for specialists, practitioners, scientists and managers in the new growing area of health information technologies. It is particularly relevant for those people - a large increasing number - who bridge and integrate knowledges in medicine (basic and clinical) and advanced technologies such as IT. The intended audience is broad and interdisciplinary; biomedical engineers, medical practitioners interested in the advanced IT infrastructures applied to medicine, computer scientists, academic professionals and graduate students, health care managers, standardization bodies, industrial engineers: designers and planners of innovative health care technologies, specialists in telemedicine, internet computing, computer graphics applications.

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the kinds of “information highways” and “information societies” that are now being visualised. The (interactive) communication between healthcare providers and their patients or other healthcare providers regardless of geographic distance, namely telemedicine, will become of central importance. The objective of any advanced infrastructure that can be imagined for future healthcare must be to provide a global uniform level of healthcare. To facilitate the possibilities for any international collaboration standardised approaches must be adopted.

In 1996, Euromed project supported by EC ISIS '95 began, and its objective was to propose a new standard combining computer networking and advanced medical imaging diagnosis. It became apparent, early in the project, that the maturity of the Internet and World Wide Web could support the global interconnection of computing resources to medical institutions. Additionally, web technologies could provide the homogenous interface and multi-model visualization platform required for medical imaging diagnosis.

It is foreseen that the WWW will become the important communication medium of any future information society especially if this is combined with the concept of telemedicine which captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementations. The WWW could then be regarded as the (Meta) operating system, or the basis for an advanced infrastructure, for future healthcare. However, it also became apparent that if such a proposal would be a realistic possibility it would have to be integrated into a complete advanced medical society. Thus the Euromed project has identified an advanced infrastructure for future healthcare consisting of twenty building blocks, as shown in Figure 1.

Since the organisation, interaction and communication of information between elements of the building blocks is critical, a new (global) standard has been proposed by the EUROMED Project, based on Web technologies, called “Virtual Medical Worlds”. It provides the potential to organise existing medical information and promote the foundations for its integration into future forms of medical information systems. It utilises the hypergraphics and hyper-textual qualities of VRML and HTML as a navigational medium to remotely access multi-media information systems, and web-based languages such as Java to initiate visualisation, processing and non-Web based packages. The web can therefore be used as the interconnective glue between all the aspects related to future healthcare. Based on the VMW concept the contributions, ranging from the storage of data to its usage and from diagnosis to education and training, are organized into four sections, namely:

Section 1: Advanced medical information society

Section 2: Compunetics

Section 3: Telemedical Informatics

Section 4: Medical Imaging Technologies

Many people have contributed to the success of EUROMED. We would especially like to thank Richard Robb (Mayo Clinic), Simon Smith (EC DG III), Massimo Luciolli (EC DG III) and Luciano Beolchi (EC DG XIII).

Andy Marsh

Lucio Grandinetti

Tuomo Kauranne