Abstract
As healtheare providers become incressiegly decentralized and distributed, information systems support must follow unit by providing healthcare professionals with flexible, adaptable and secure views of medical data in a timely fashion. To this end, this paper introduces the notion of manifestations of medical image objects in a heterogeneous client environment. We define the fundamental building blocks of manifestations using object-oriented concepts. Examples are given of how constraints and rules can be used to govern the presentation of data within objects and for the environmental (e.g. hardware and network) and user defined factors (e.g. preferences) that act as inputs to manifestations. Using these techniques, we give several examples of user interactions with a system based on manifestations. This paper demonstrates how objects can be efficiently and effectively presented to users with various information appliances using manifestation techniques.