Visual Data Navigation in Web Documents

We have undertaken extensive end-user assessments of the volume of visualisation component developed in the Smartdocs project. This component allows interactive 3-D visualisation of medical image data within a standard word-processing document. The application was tested with clinical end-users from ENT surgery and neurosurgery. The intention is to use this data to publish a scientific paper describing the potential value of embeddable Smartdocs components in radiological reports and electronic patient records. The ability to produce embeddable visualisation components in electronic patient records will also form part of our prior knowledge contributions to future collaborations under our "radiological workstation" research programme. This research programme addresses a wide range of features for the development of advanced radiological workstation is on the dissemination of radiological reports and images. The ability to insert visualisations, which can be actively interrogated within electronic patient reports, is a significant intellectual asset.

The increasing number and availability of geo-referenced datasets leads to the need for tools to analyse them, and Fly-Through Viewer represents an easy and user-friendly way to visualize such data, using advanced 3D capabilities. The exploration of the terrain is carried out by simulating a flight according to one of the following modalities: - Manually inserts the coordinates of the points belonging to the flight path. - Set the path by clicking over a 2D (nadir) image: the clicked points are the nodes of the path. - The progression of the resulting flight is shown in real-time in a 3D viewport; the application allows the user to control several parameters related to the flight, such as the speed and the altitude. - In order to provide the possibility of returning to earlier steps of interaction sessions and visualizations, a SmartDoc feature called Bookmark is implemented. A bookmark is basically a snapshot of the application component at a particular moment, showing a particular state of a Fly-Through session. - The SmartDoc hyperlink concept has been implemented in the Fly-Through component, allowing direct references to fly-through scenarios and analyses to be made from within the text of SmartDoc enabled documents. - Validated through knowledge Geographic Information Systems (GIS for short) environment.

The SMARTDOC for DICOMed RIS (fully extended version of the light DICOM viewer) is a COM based AND OLE ENABLED solution for reading, loading, visualising, manipulating, and COLLABORATING on DICOM images stored within DICOM files, that can be used into COM based or OLE enabled applications within Office and/or WEB based reports. Through the SMARTDOCs for DICOMed RIS one can open DICOM medical file (with extension .DCM) and can save on disk some copies of that kind of archives. To embed DICOM files inside a compound Office documents, it has been necessary to write particular additional functions (DICOM Object module), compatible with the OLE technology. The SMARTDOC for DICOMed RIS is able to visualise the medical images contained in DICOM file inside a normal window and through several layouts. In order to display the same images within the entire Offices document, it is necessary to embed them in a proper OLE standard: the metafile one.

SmartDoc VolumeViewer comes in three versions that address the different usage areas stand-alone analysis, archiving and remote collaboration. The visualization and analysis features are the same in all versions. The stand-alone application component is meant for desktop or laptop examinations, meaning that the user can perform the examination of the patient data on his or her personal computer, at work, at home or while travelling. VolumeViewerX is an ActiveX version of the stand-alone VolumeViewer. It is equipped with additional functionality that interfaces the Smartdoc document components in order to create true dynamic documents with the ability to use hyperlinks and to store any desired data within the document file. A dynamic document in the medical workflow is an interactive and dynamic patient report that easily can be distributed and archived. The patient data is stored in the same file as the describing text and the reader can interact with the patient data directly in the document. VolumeViewerNet is the network version and is equipped with a communication object that enables collaborative analysis by two or more remotely situated users. VolumeViewerNet provides an easy approach to collaborative visualization enabling the users to intuitively start and connect to a collaborative session in order to exchange knowledge and expertise. Medical applications of the Smartdoc concept reflect the functionality of the software in extending interactive images into the clinicians and medical researchers normal working environment. A clinician issued with a radiologists report for use in clinic is provided only with a verbal description and not with access to the images themselves. In many cases these descriptions can be quite complex particularly where pathology has affected the structure of normal organs and led to the displacement or destruction of normal structures. SmartDoc allows the clinician to embed images within clinical and research reports in order to illustrate findings and observations that are made in the text. Smartdoc goes beyond this simple functionality and makes the images and fully interactive within the report document. The availability of a free downloadable Viewer encourages the widespread use and publication of interactive medical reports. This structure meets a number of significant demands that can be implemented in clinical practice.

This application has been designed as a customised visualiser for data derived from the High Throughput Experimentation (HTE) domain. The application is entirely built up from COM components embedded in a visual basic interface. Part of the reason for developing the application was to test the performance of COM in data intensive visualisation. The application imports HTE data stored in Excel spreadsheets and makes available coupled scatter and parallel co-ordinate plots to allow the user to visually and interactively explore and filter the data. Using common toolkits developed elsewhere in the project two related versions of this application are available: - A version that enables collaboration over the network via the application. - A set of embeddable derived from the HTE viewer that the user can insert in word documents and other applications, which enable the user to create customisable visually interactive documents (Smartdoc). All forms of this application are available for download from the smartdoc website, together with other documentation and evaluation results.

The component based DICOM Toolkit is a set of COM based libraries for use by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) for searching, retrieving, reading and loading DICOM data into COM compliant applications. The Toolkit gets images from DICOM compliant digital archives (i.e., central DICOM servers, local DICOM Dirs, or DICOM CDs/DVDs), to search, find and retrieve patient study that may consist of an individual or a series of digital images. The Toolkit is specifically designed to work in a PACS environment, by using the DICOM 3.0 network protocol as the standard to interconnect with third-party devices. Its internal organizational structure thus resembles the DICOM 3.0 object hierarchy, by distinguishing between different patients, studies, series and images levels. Generally, images can be routed to DICOM reader local database from different data sources, including: - Direct storage from other DICOM-compliant devices, - Query and retrieve from a DICOM server (e.g., from a PACS), - Import from DICOM CD-ROMs. The DICOM reader can be integrated in the Volume ViewerX, and used to de-coded DICOM files that are visualized in 3d by the Volume ViewerX.

We have developed software to allow data exploration of multispectral image datasets, which allows a clinician to explore multispectral images in order to identify tissues with similar properties. The approach to image analysis is novel and answers a growing need as the use of multispectral datasets increases due to improvements in the technical abilities of magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography and digital isotope-based imaging methods. The potential applications of this approach include clinical applications, of interest to radiologists, and medical research. The analysis package is unique at the present time and is an ideal basis for a medical workstation tool. There is no competing product at the present time. The application is specifically designed to deal with calculated secondary or parametric images which are increasingly commonly used particularly in the field of MRI and CT. Further work for the development of this approach must include publication of the concept and testing of the data exploration approach in combination with clinical parametric datasets. University of Manchester is an academic partner and has no plans for commercial exploitation. Academic exploitation will continue. The software is already in use as a tool to support a number of ongoing medical research projects.

The .NET based, Office and WEB enabled version of the WEB Viewer is a web compliant solution for examining medical images over an intranet or the Internet. The Web Viewer gets images from DICOM compliant digital archive servers to display and manipulate patient study that may consist of an individual or a series of digital images The Web Viewer can be used as a stand alone application through the Microsoft Internet Explorer or can be embedded within documents (E.g., Word, Power Point) to view CT, MR, X-ray, Digital X-ray (DX), Digital Mammography X-ray (MG), Digital Intra-oral X-ray (IO), XA/XR, NM, RF, OT, Ultrasound, CR and many other types of images, from monochrome through to 24-bit true colour. The current version of the Web Viewer is a very thin application that does not need major components, applets, plug-ins to be downloaded for being used. It is a really Web based application that does not need data to be moved from the image archive server to the viewing client in that it embeds images into Web compatible format, and it does not require that the viewing client have locally installed and registered components capable to read DICOM images: DICOM images are read form the server and trans-coded into Web compatible format before they are broadcasted to the viewing client.

A set of collaborative components for extending an existing COM application to support Collaborative Visualization. The tools are used together with free available MS DirectX library and form the foundation for SmartDoc Virtual Collaborative Teams: The Smartdoc collaborative components are the backbone of a Smartdoc collaborative session. This scenario of a SmartDoc application is the collaborative version based on Microsofts DirectPlay. The SmartDoc collaboratory network version includes a collaborative environment where two or more users can meet together is cyber space displaying and interacting with the same dataset remotely. Bookmarks and annotations can also be used in the collaborative session. There are multiple ongoing or completed projects in the area of collaborative visualization systems. Unfortunately, many of these frameworks are using an architecture that makes them hard to modify, reuse, or extend with new functionality. SmartDoc has not tried to invent yet another collaborative system and network protocol. SmartDoc application components benefit from Microsofts DirectPlay that was used to program multiplayer network games and provides classes that handle low-level network communication. The DirectPlay layer separates the network layer from the application layer, i.e. the application itself does not have to communicate with the network, which provide collaborative visualization to SmartDocs components.

A set of general-purpose Knowledge Discovery and Visual Data Mining application components for analysis and visualisation of multidimensional data in Excel spreadsheets. MDViewer, 3D Scatter, 2D Scatter and ParallelCoordinate application components (Stand alone, Networked and Smartdoc versions): Knowledge discovery and visual data mining, which consist in extracting valuable and relevant knowledge from large volumes of data, have received much attention these last years. The approaches used for knowledge discovery are non-trivial and often domain specific, depending on the canonical mining primitives. The data patterns discovered are typically used in decision-making whether in business, in scientific research or other. While significant research has been done on knowledge discovery from large corporations, most of the approaches are related to numerical transactional data such as market-basket analysis, web activities, etc., thus very little has been achieved on visual data mining probably due to the complexity of integrating interactive exploration, visual user interface and data mining. Visual Discovery can be even more valuable when it is combined with visualization technology that provides real time reporting with three-dimensional graphics. The SmartDoc Knowledge Discovery components transform spreadsheet data into visual metaphors-3D, colour-coded, interactive displays. These visual metaphors transform complex statistical relationships into clear visual information SmartDocs for the end user. 3D Scatter and Parallel graphs, for example, can be expanded, zoomed, panned and essentially animated embedded into dynamic electronic documents. Four different SmartDocs in the area of Knowledge Discovery have been developed: - Multidimensional (MD) Viewer - 3DScatter - Parallel Coordinates - HTE The MD-Viewer SmartDoc consists of three knowledge discovery components; 2D scatter chart component, a 3D scatter chart component and a ParallelCoordinates component. These three components visualize the same dataset and complement each other, further enhancing the understanding of the dataset.

The Smartdoc document components are the backbone of Smartdoc dynamic documents. They provide the functionality that makes it possible to store and retrieve data from documents and to use hyperlinks that scrolls the document and accesses bookmarks in the visualization components. The document components consist of storage tools and hyperlink tools. SmartDoc brings interactive and collaborative visualization into reports in industry standard MS Word format. The normal contents of a report, text and images, are extended with interactive 2D/3D visualization, image, analysis and decision support. Data and bookmarks are integrated into the document structure, which make the SmartDoc just as easy to handle as a traditional document. The reader is given a more active role and can interact with the embedded data in order to gain a better understanding of the reports contents. The author prepares visualization bookmarks, i.e. stores certain visualization parameters that can be used at any time in order to highlight a specific view that is being described in the text. SmartDoc hyperlinks are special document components that enable access to bookmarks within the embedded application component. Using hyperlinks, a SmartDoc can contain guided reading paths. The author uses hyperlinks to define a certain reading order and can prepare a report intended for different groups of readers.

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