Distribution of medical information in a metropolitan high performance network

摘要

The delivery of health care and sharing of medical information over a distance using telecommunication systems involve a diverse set of clinical, educational and research applications and an equally diverse set of e technologies. The technological basis and the practical issues are highly variable from one clinical application to another. Moreover, if the information to be exchanged involves images, a special problem in cardiology is how to handle full motion video echocardiograms and cine angiograms. In the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, Brazil a set of Research Institutions have been working in a project as part of a national effort to provide a very high performance backbone using ATM links. This project is based on image servers, which can store, send and receive medical images, as well as a set of visualization applications which can communicate with the servers using DICOM 3.0 protocol. In this work, the integration of the existing LANs and TCP/IP applications with the ATM infrastructure was performed by a Linux implementation of Classical IP over ATM. This superhighway and the applications are currently being validated between the two major hospitals in the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, Brazil.