Tele-EEG in epilepsy: review and initial experience with software to enable EEG review over a telephone link

Remote reporting of EEGs can be broadly divided into two functions—routine reporting of several or many records, and urgent reporting in individual cases. The routine reporting can usually brook a delay of several days, but urgent reports usually need to be made within hours. Routine EEGs for reporting can be transmitted on paper, microfilm, using recent PC-based media such as CD, or by the postal system or courier. Urgent records may be sent rapidly by fax1, although it is usually only practicable to send a small proportion of the record. These methods are all practicable and are, to our knowledge, used by departments of Clinical Neurophysiology in the UK. However, the routine methods all require time, expense and delay for practical implementation, and faxing for urgent reports is limited in that remontaging is not possible, and it is time consuming if more than a few pages are transmitted. Both routine and urgent reporting could be easily accomplished, with a minimum cost in time or expense, by electronic transmission of the digitised signals over telephone or other data communication lines. This is not trivial as the volumes of data are considerable: typically 40–100 MB per hour or 1 GB per hour with video. Three approaches may be adopted: