Communication technology for telemedicine

From the invention of the telephone, medical practitioners have employed electronic communication to facilitate patient care. With the advent of computer networks, communication of clinical information both within and between institutions has entered a new era. One thing is clear from even a cursory examination of the history of electronic communication in medicine, the trend is toward increasing volume and complexity of information and increasing demand for communication bandwidth. State of the art applications such as regional picture archive and communication system (PACS)s, full-motion high quality telemedicine, and telepresence surgery place stringent requirements on the facilitating communication technologies. To provide a basis for understanding these requirements a brief tutorial of the basic concepts of digital communication is presented. To illustrate relative performance and capabilities an integrated teleradiology/telemedicine system utilizing a wide-area asynchronous transfer mode network is described and compared to a more conventional teleradiology application based on T1 rate frame relay service