Transforming medical imaging applications into collaborative PACS-based telemedical systems

Abstract

One of the medical technologies distinguished for its clinical value is telemedicine.Telemedical systems provide healthcare services at any time and any where irrespective of geographical location. These systems are even more interesting when they provide collaboration among the users (e.g., teleconferencing). Nonetheless, all these systems are not practical for use in clinical workflow unless they are able to communicate with the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). On the other hand, there are many medical imaging applications that are not developed as telemedical systems. A large number of them do not support collaboration and many do not communicate with the PACS and therefore cannot be directly used in clinical workflows.This thesis presents an approach based on a three-tier architecture. The architecture and the developed components within it transform medical imaging applications into collaborative, PACS-based, telemedical systems. As a result, current developed medical imaging applications that are not telemedical, do not support collaboration, and do not communicate with PACS, can be enhanced to support collaboration among a group of physicians, be accessed remotely, and be clinically useful.ii The main advantage of the proposed architecture is that it does not impose any modification to the current medical imaging applications and does not make any assumptions about the underlying architecture or operating system.