Medical reports play an essential role in treatment planning, communication, presentation and decision finding. The current practice is to keep patient data as text, handwritten charts, diagnosis images (Photos, CAT, X-Rays), and cast models at different places. Usually if the patient visits a different clinic the data must be collected again. With computer technology all patient data can be put into electronic form accessible via fast growing networks. But access to this data is difficult and not available at all places using a single user interface. To overcome this situation we have developed a report generator which is part of our Intelligent Dental Care System. The output is hypertext markup language (HTML), images (in GIF and JPEG), sound, and virtual reality modeling language (VRML) [BPP95]. During a work session the data is created and associated into a report with the following structure: Starting from an introduction (HTML) all other data can be accessed via hyperlinks. The models of the teeth are stored using VRML. For each tooth hyperlinks are added to distance maps and other diagnosis data. Important for the user is that a relation is specified only once. The generator creates a table of contents automatically and adds hyperlinks. The example in Fig. 5 shows the combination of 2-D hypertext document with a 3-D model. In the shown 3-D (WebSpace) browser the last molar tooth is highlighted and linked to the underlying textual description with related distance map.
Figure: Report using VRML and HTML