SYGMA: A General Object-oriented Medical Application Development System

Abstract

The authors are describing SYGMA, a general object-oriented medical application development system, which was built during 1990 in the Department of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Documentation of the University Hospital Graz, Austria. The system is intended to replace most of the existing applicative software for processing general medical data in the departments of diagnostic radiology, pathology, radiotherapy,etc.

In the introduction the authors are giving a brief outline of object-oriented programming, applied to medical application development. The authors describe the existing medical documentation system with its advantages and disadvantages, as well as the goals to be obtained with the new system. A brief specification of the pilot area (a radiology information system) for the new development is also presented.

SYGMA, a SYstem for General Medical Applications, consists of a stand-alone program for performing common medical data processing functions in an object-oriented manner. The general mechanisms and concepts are defined in the SYGMA program, but their behavior and the interaction with the outside world are described in the environment. This allows building the applications without changing the program itself, but rather by customizing the application environment (screen layout, parameters, control files).

Finally, the authors discuss the experiences with building and using the SYGMA system as well as intended future developments.