The National Medical Knowledge Bank

This paper describes an advanced development program to create a medical information system called the National Medical Knowledge Bank (NMKB). This five year program is sponsored in part by a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program. The goals of the program, covering computer-assisted diagnosis, medical training, remote consultation, and medical records storage, are defined. The webbased architecture of the medical knowledge bank is presented, including the Teradata Multimedia Services, an object/relational database which serves as the central data repository for medical data stored in multiple data types. Also described are the applications of physician support, including case-based reasoning and image analysis for determining case similarity; virtual medical conferences; and initial/continuing medical education.