Integrated visualization of problemcentric urologic patient records.

The collision of computer-based technologies and the medical environment is resulting in an increasingly electronic multimedia patient record, consisting of not only the traditional types of data (e.g., clinic notes and laboratory reports), but also digital images (e.g., computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) and other visual representations of patient data (e.g., pulmonary function graphs and urodynamic charts). Given the increasing amount of data made available to physicians, it is not only critical that the totality of a patient's medical record be accessible to a clinician, but that the diverse data be integrated and presented in a manner conducive to patient management: key information should be easily discovered. This paper describes a problemcentric time-based visualization of urologic conditions, whereby a patient's medical history is automatically organized around a medical problem and presented as a graphic chronology. Urology-related data in the patient medical record is organized in accord with an expert constructed knowledge-base, and plotted on a timeline using iconic representations. The user interface permits the physician to quickly view multimedia data and to visualize relationships between events in the patient's history.