Design and Implementation of QBISM, a 3D Medical Image Database System

We describe the design and implementation of QBISM (Query By Interactive, Spatial Multimedia), a prototype for querying and visualizing 3D spatial data. Our driving application is in an area in medical research, in particular, Functional Brain Mapping. The system is built on top of the Starburst DBMS, extended to handle spatial data types, and, specifically, scalar fields and arbitrary regions of space within such fields. In this paper we list the requirements of the application, discuss the logical and physical database design issues, and present timing results from our prototype. We observed that the DBMS’ early spatial filtering results in significant performance savings because the system response time is dominated by the amount of data retrieved, transmitted, and rendered.