A Collaborative Architecture for Healthcare Applications

In this paper, we present the software architecture of a collaborative visualization environment that has been developed to support the sharing of the state of Visualization among distributed healthcare applications. The proposed software architecture has three tiers: an application tier, which is aimed at intercepting user requests, providing results to the users, and performing the remote events received; a middleware tier, which is in charge of distributing messages to all users; and a data tier, which handles persistent storage. Further, we also present the implementation of a proof-of-concept prototype that enables two remote users to simultaneously visualize the same medical images, reconstructed by using the surface rendering technique, and to manipulate the data and interact with each other in a shared virtual environment.