Inter-hospital PACS designed for teleradiology and teleconference using a secured high-speed network
Yutaka Ando, Masayuki Kitamura, Nobuhiro Tsukamoto, Osamu Kawaguchi, Etsuo Kunieda, Atsushi Kubo, Ehiichi Kohda, Kyoichi Hiramatsu, Toshikazu Sakano, Tatsuya Fujii, Akira Okumura, Isao Furukawa, Junji Suzuki, Sadayasu Ono · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
We developed a tele-radiology and tele-conference system between our related hospitals. This system consisted of the image database, the WWW server, WWW browsers, high resolution CRT displays, the videoconference system and an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. In advance X-ray images were stored into the Image Save And Carry magneto- optical (MO) disks, then images on the MO were transferred to the image database. The image database was created from MO disks. Total amount of images reached 100 GB and the number of the image was 65,000. The ATM network connected the hospitals each other. The ATM network device provided the permanent virtual circuit function. The transmission speed was from 6Mbit/second to 155 Mbit/second. The client station consisted of the WWW browser and the super high definition CRT display which had the 2k X 2k full color frame memory and 54 X 54 cm square display area. The result of the query was transformed to a hypertext markup language. Then a browser on a client machine displayed the result. The server could retrieve some images in about ten seconds and transmit an image from a server to a client in 2-10 seconds that depend on the network speed. At the tele- radiology, both terminals could display same image and physicians could talk each other by the videoconference system. We solved the security problems by the PVC methods and the on time password device. The ATM network showed the high transmission performance and good security. Physicians were able to use this system with no special training and this system brought us an effective utilization of the image.