From multimodality digital imaging to multimedia patient record.

The constant improvement in computer power and performance nowadays offers convenient and efficient means of manipulating images, graphics, and movies on off-the-shelf workstations. With this improvement the trend toward integration of multimodality clinical documents from patient records comes naturally. Images and graphs are certainly the most important part of the complementary information that must accompany the text and numerical data. It is, however, possible to include sounds and voice messages together with all the other modalities. In medicine that could certainly help conveying hart murmur or sounds, but could also offer a convenient way of including vocal messages and comments. These new possibilities will certainly change the way physicians use workstations for direct communication. The computer industry will soon offer means of interactive communication between remote users through computer workstations. That alone will open a completely new era in cooperative computing and remote consultation scenarios in medicine. More than the technology itself, a complete change in behavior and work habits can be expected in the medical community.