Dynamic link between ECG and clinical data by a CORBA-based query engine and temporal mapping.

It is important to create a dynamic link method to link distributed patient data across multiple hospitals on an "as needed" basis because the pre-defined links (an item of data has a character or group of characters that indicates the storage of another item of data) are difficult to be managed, or can only be established in part, or are not necessary to be pre-defined in many cases, especially in linking the descriptive data such as history data with the corresponding examination data across multiple hospitals. A method of linking electrocardiogram (ECG) with clinical data dynamically in a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) environment has been achieved and verified in a real computing environment to approach to this goal. By this method, distributed patient data can be linked dynamically by a CORBA-based query engine and temporal mapping no matter where they are located on the Internet. The necessary temporal information is provided by either computing or human being. Since multiple time-axes for different databases are involved in, some temporal reasoning methods (such as mapping occurrences across temporal contexts and determining bounds for absolute occurrences, etc.) are applied to this study, and a series of temporal mappings including the first mapping, the secondary mapping, the contextual mapping, the extended mapping, the previous mapping and the next mapping are created. In comparison with the pre-defined link, the major strengths of this method are the dynamic link on an "as needed" basis, no limitation of institutional boundaries, easy creation, simplifying the data storage, and the high flexibility, etc.