Title Page -- Contents -- 1. Data and Information Processing in Medicine -- 1.1 Need for Improved Quality in Health Care and Medical Diagnosis -- 1.2 Principles of Open Distributed Processing in Medicine The Berlin Approach -- 1.3 Medical Information Processing - The BAIK Model -- 1.4 Existing and Future Communication Techniques for Open Information Processing -- 1.5 Recent Developments in Medical Information Processing -- 1.6 The BERMED Application Environment -- 2. Concepts and Architecture of an Open Distributed Heterogeneous Management System -- 2.1 Information Management in Patient Care -- 2.2 Realization of an Open Distributed Management System -- 2.3 Computer-Supported Cooperative Work -- 2.4 Multimedia Documents -- 2.5 Security and Protection -- 2.6 Communication Infrastructure -- 2.7 Image Processing Pipeline For Medical Applications -- 2.8 Towards a Medical Terminology Infrastructure in an Open Clinical Application Environment -- 2.9 Knowledge Based Support for Medical Diagnoses -- 3. Medical Application Based on Open Distributed Heterogeneous Management -- 3.1 Integrated Medical Application -- 3.2 Evaluation of the Realized System Obstacles to Further Integration -- 3.3 Demonstrators for Telemedicine Services -- 4. Advanced Integrated Medical Query Systems -- 4.1 Retrieval of Independent Information Sources in a Clinical Application Environment -- 4.2 Digital Signal Processing -- 4.3 Support Platform for Medical Workstations -- 5. Aspects on Future Developments of Integrated Medical Information Processing -- 5.1 Integrated Clinical Information Management -- 5.2 Integration of Administration -- 5.3 Communication Technology -- 5.4 Future Directions in Distributed Computing -- Contributors to the project BERMED -- Author Affiliations -- Author Index