Teleradiology on the World Wide Web

T elemedicine aims to improve access to medical care and to reduce costs through the use of telecommunication and data-networking technologies. The hypermedia structure of the Web in particular offers the possibility for global distribution of medical databases, such as those for medical imaging and patient records. However, the Web does not currently support all of the necessary requirements for telemedicine applications. More security is required for patient data than is now easily available. In addition, successful Web teleimaging applications must be able to reconcile the variety of image file formats used in medical diagnosis. To test the feasibility of a Java/Web-based approach to teleimaging, we embedded a set of Java applets to interface with a hospital information system used by referring physicians and consulting radiologists for teleradiology. Java offers a partial solution to the security requirements, with the promise of increased privacy in future releases of the Java Development Kit (JDK). Java also enables platform independence with regard to disparate image formats. The resulting system, called Medinet, is currently undergoing clinical evaluation as part of the Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) program of the European Union.