Packetized radiographic image transfers over local area networks for diagnosis and conferencing

The authors present a multimedia medical communications system based on packet local area networks. This system is intended to facilitate the communications between radiologists and physicians within a hospital. Radiographs are taken, digitized, and then stored in the database. Radiologists retrieve radiographic images from the database for diagnosis, and make diagnostic reports to be stored in the database. Physicians can then consult these radiographic images and diagnostic reports. A real-time conference can be set up between a radiologist and a physician who are in different locations, for discussing a particular case or radiographic images can be retrieved from the database for diagnosis and conferencing. Simulations indicate the delay for displaying an image of 1 Mb from the local storage (hard disk) at a workstation is approximately 6.5 s