An integrated medical workstation with a multimodal user interface, knowledge-based user support, and multimedia documents

Abstract

An integrated workstation developed for use in clinical medicine is described. The specific application domain is gastroenterology with endoscopic, ultrasonic, and laboratory units. The following modules for data collection and management during ultrasound examinations have been implemented and tested: a multimodal user interface with speech and symbol recognition to reduce complexity in human-machine interaction, knowledge-based components to support the user and to structure dialogues dynamically, and techniques for handling multimedia documents that consist of images, text, structured text, graphics, and digitized speech. The system was implemented using networked frontend and backend workstations under UNIX.<>