Design of a medical image data warehouse for epilepsy diagnosis and research

There exists a need for a systematic software engineering approach to create medical information systems that support clinical diagnostic patient studies and biomedical imaging research. The purpose of this research is to create a formal design framework to describe medical image information systems and derive design patterns for solving problems within that framework. The framework is implemented as a prototype image data warehouse that supports epilepsy research and patient care. The goal of this system is to enable more efficient and effective utilization of medical images, laboratory tests, psychometric tests, and textual data in epilepsy research and care than what is currently supported by Picture Archiving and Communication Systems.