QBISM: Extending a DBMS to Support 3D Medical Images

Describes the design and implementation of QBlSM (Query By Interactive, Spatial Multimedia), a prototype for querying and visualizing 3D spatial data. The first 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, specifically, scalar fields and arbitrary regions of space within such fields. The authors list the requirements of the application, discuss the logical and physical database design issues, and present timing results from their prototype. They 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. >