World Wide Web platform-independent access to biomedical text/image databases

The biomedical digital library of the future is expected to provide access to stores of biomedical database information containing text and images. Developing efficient methods for accessing such databases is a research effort at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications of the National Library of Medicine. In this paper we examine issues in providing access to databases across the Web and describe a tool we have developed: the Web-based Medical Information Retrieval System (WebMIRS). We address a number of critical issues, including preservation of data integrity, efficient database design, access to documentation, quality of query and results interfaces, capability to export results to other software, and exploitation of multimedia data. WebMIRS is implemented as a Java applet that allows database access to text and to associated image data, without requiring any user software beyond a standard Web browser. The applet implementation allows WebMIRS to run on any hardware platform (such as PCs, the Macintosh, or Unix machines) which supports a Java-enabled Web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. WebMIRS is being tested on text/x-ray image databases created from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics.