A knowledge-based infrastructure for the management of diagnostic imaging procedures in the heart failure domain

Within the European HEARTFAID Project, an integrated platform of services has been developed to assist chronic heart failure stakeholders in their routine workflow and to provide an optimal management of heart failure patients, by exploiting the most advanced technologies, innovative methods for diagnostic data processing, and significant and up-to-date knowledge, suitably formalized. Since signal and imaging investigations are currently a basic step of the diagnostic, prognostic and follow-up processes of heart diseases, the platform has been designed so as to include an advanced system for the management, storage and deployment of the related heterogeneous information, ranging from the raw data - consisting in 1D signals, 2D/3D images and image sequences - to the extracted quantitative parameters and, finally, to their interpretation. The purpose of this paper is to describe an effective way to obtain an integrated management of all the data and transactions across the distributed repositories necessary to deal with such workflows. Intelligent knowledge-based services are also provided for assisting - in a holistic approach - all the decision making processes related to those data. In particular, among the several functionalities provided by HEARTFAID platform, the paper focuses on the integration of echocardiography workflows. To this end, a suitably developed standard-compliant IT infrastructure called EchoCardio Lab is introduced and architectural details of its components are given.