Medical Image Communication Systems

This paper discusses the feasibility of an integral communications system to include images for medical applications, for both intra-hospital communications and networking to remote locations and systems. Emphasis is placed on image communications because they will become an important component of telecommunications traffic in the 1980's if the proper facilities are provided. Terminals distributed throughout a hospital and in remote locations could access the databases of images and medical reports. Radiologists could prepare the medical diagnosis reports much faster, shortly after the radiograph was taken, by examining the radiographs on a suitable soft-copy display and dictating the report, ultimately using automated voice recognition systems. To lower the cost of the system the expensive hardware could be shared by means of communications, so that their utilization is maximized. Several configurations are proposed in this paper and their relative cost/performance compared. System evolution is also considered.