Using Design Patterns to Develop a Hyper-controllable Medical Image Application

The basic idea of hyper-control is to use a multimedia document to control other application systems[Chen 96]. In the original Command Processor pattern, the fixed execution sequence of computation codes and dialog codes hinders an application from supporting the hyper-control mechanism. Based on an extension of this pattern and other related patterns, we have developed a medical image system Discover, which can support the hyper-control mechanism. In this paper, the system architecture of Discover will be described. We will also give a practical example to explain the available ways for a hyper-control document to "hyper-control" an application, and describe our experience in using patterns.