Abstract
e-Health systems provide a collaborative platform for sharing patients' medical data typically stored in distributed autonomous healthcare data sources. Each autonomous source stores its medical and multimedia data without following any global structure. This causes heterogeneity in the underlying sources with respect to the data and storage structure. Therefore, a data interoperability mechanism is required for sharing the data among the heterogeneous sources. A proper metadata structure is also necessary to represent multimedia content in the sources to enable efficient query processing. Considering these needs, we present an interoperability solution for sharing data among heterogeneous data sources. We also propose a metadata management framework for medical multimedia content including X-ray, ECG, MRI, and ultrasound images. The framework identifies features, generates and represents metadata, and produces identifiers for the medical multimedia content to facilitate efficient query processing. The framework has been tested with various user queries and the accuracy of the query results evaluated by means of precision, recall, and user feedback methods. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.