Design and performance evaluation considerations of a multimedia medical database

Multimedia information management and communications systems for medical applications have been undergoing design and development. The aim of these activities has been the development of distributed computer systems providing storage, processing, and communication services required by the medical community. One of the main critical issues of such systems is the handling of multimedia information (i.e., text, images, graphics, and voice) in a uniform way and the fast access to images through the network. We present the design architecture and concepts used in our multimedia database system, along with its performance evaluation. The evaluation focuses on the response times of a multimedia medical database server, as seen by remote workstations for various retrieval and image transfer requests. For this purpose, a queueing network model was developed and simulated. Communications between the workstations and the database server are governed by the client-server model using TCP/IP and appropriate application protocols on a 10 Mb/s Ethernet LAN