Interactive Segmentation of Volumetric Medical Images for Collaborative Telemedicine

Teleradiology, which enables distribution and sharing of digital medical images for collaborative diagnosis, has enjoyed rapid success due to the advances in telecommunication and multimedia technologies. However, the interactive collaboration mechanisms that control the editing among multiple users on the same object is often limited to simple ‘locking’ concept, where only one user edits an object, while all other users become only viewers. In this study, we introduce a new collaborative mechanism for networked teleradiology systems, demonstrated with the collaborative segmentation of 3D medical images. Our system enables concurrent annotation / region of interest (ROI) control by multiple users on the same image data, which can be useful for collaborative diagnosis as well as for teaching and training purposes. A preliminary prototype system is developed and the result suggests a promising collaborative mechanism for teleradiology applications.