Abstract
Web-based virtual collaboration is increasingly gaining popularity in almost every area in our society due to the fact that it can bridge the gap imposed by time and geographical constraints. However, in medical field, such collaboration has been less popular than other fields. Some of the reasons were timeliness, security, and preciseness of the information they are dealing with. In this paper, we are proposing a web-based distributed medical collaboration system called Virtual Collaboration System for Medicine (VCSM) for medical doctors that meet the needs. The proposed system consists of two parts - multimedia presentation and recordable virtual collaboration. The former supports synchronized multimedia presentation using Synchronous Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL.) It allows synchronization of the contents of a PowerPoint presentation file and a video file. The presentation may be provided to the participants before the discussion begins. Next, in the virtual collaboration stage, participants can use text along with associated symbols during the discussion over the presented medical images. The symbols such as arrows or polygons can be set or removed dynamically to represent areas of interest in digital images using so called layered architecture that separates image layer from annotation layer. XML files are used to record participants' opinions along with the symbols over some particular images