Archived: 30 January 2006
University of Adelaide Masters by coursework thesis, November 2004.
Supervisor: Paul Coddington
The Visible Human is a large-scale set of digitized images of the human body for education and research. In previous work, a Web-based viewer was developed to provide easy access to Visible Human images, using a Java applet as an interactive client interface to enable the user to select the type of data and desired section slice through a web browser. However, the viewer assumes knowledge of which server is storing the data and also the details of how it is stored (image format, directory structure, different resolutions, etc). With the advancement in medical technology, a number of organizations in different countries will collect and create many kinds of human data sets. These data sets, which may be stored in different image format, directory structure, and resolutions, will be distributed on more than one server on the Internet. The problem is the viewer is not able to have the knowledge of all digitized human data sets on the Internet, so the viewer has no capability to access various digitized human data sets on the Internet. In my project, I used a Web Services mechanism to establish a client-server structure. The Viewer (Java Applet) as a client-side interface will pass an XML document which includes parameters as XML elements that specify the particular image which the client wants to view. On the server-side I generated a SOAP service, which receives the XML document, uses those parameters to find the suitable location of the image, and then returns an XML document that includes a URL specifying the image address for the client to access.