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capacity of the e-mail, connection problems, and
so on.
The analysis of the information collected
during the field study allowed us to develop the
prototypes described in the next section.
munities of physicians. Differently from the case
of the pneumologists and radiologists (Costabile
et al., 2006a), the application workshops designed
for the physicians of the new project (neurologists
and neuroradiologists) have an overview area on
the top of the screen which may be used to browse
MRI plats or EEG portions. The overview area is
the electronic counterpart of the diaphanoscope
used by the physicians in a real meeting (see Fig-
ure 5). During the observations, we noticed that
neuroradiologists are only interested in MRI; thus,
in their application workshop, they find only the
MRI overview area together with tools to process
the MRI and to formulate the diagnosis.
On the other hand, neurologists study primar-
ily a great number of EEGs, but in some cases,
they analyze MRI plats. Thus, in their application
workshop there are two overview areas that are
resizable (see Figure 6). In this way, the neurolo-
gists can reduce (or even close completely) the area
containing the MRI plats, in order to expand the
EEG overview area according to their needs.
Each workshop is designed to be equipped
with a certain set of tools. Some are provided
System Customization and Tailoring
The described scenario is a typical case of co-
operative work. We adopted the SSW methodol-
ogy to build application workshops customized
to the physicians' notation, language, culture,
and background, that physicians themselves can
further tailor according to their needs. These
workshops allow the specialists to cooperate in
virtual meetings. The specialists may use their
own application workshops to perform their work-
ing tasks: for example, a specialist may analyze
the available EEG or MRI, perform annotations
and/or computations on them, select parts of them,
define diagnoses, and/or consultation requests.
The observations collected during the field
study are at the basis of the design of the application
workshops to be used by the two different com-
Figure 5. The application workshop prototype devoted to the neuro-radiologist
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