E-Health application: Development of a Web Framework for the creation and application of metric systems to the digital medical image

The purpose of this work is to present the design and implementation of a secure web framework that allows the creation and application of customized metric systems related to diagnoses based on medical images. The image studies are obtained from a Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) that was developed at the Medical Informatics and Radiological Diagnosis Centre (IMEDIR Research Centre); the web application is designed with the architectonic design pattern Model View Controller (MVC); and we opted for Java Server Pages (JSP), Servlets and Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) as implementation technology and deployment platform. Extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) is used to store the information related to the composition of the metrics, and to save the results of the application of these metrics to each image. The X-Rays were selected at random and proceed from patients at the Orthopedic Surgery Service of the Juan Canalejo Hospital and the Modelo Hospital at A Coruna. The system was validated by a comparative study, in which we used our tool, as well as an already validated software application, to apply the same metric system to a series of 29 digitalized total hip X-Rays.By testing our framework against previously validated methods, we obtain a measurement method that is not only in concordance with preceding software tools, but presents the advantages of secure access through the web, flexibility in the development of new metric systems, and integration with a PACS.