A real time collaboration system for teleradiology consultation

Real time collaboration systems, in which participants share multimedia data and applications in real time, have attracted many researchers in recent years. A teleradiology consultation system based on the real time collaboration technology is presented in this paper. Under the platform-independence consideration, Java technologies are employed to construct the system. Applying this system, an off-duty on-call radiologist can make diagnoses and report easily by viewing the transferred images at home. Owing to the accessibility of image, all users can examine and manipulate images consistently such that a secluded hospital can be assisted to hold remote consultation. To reduce the network transmission time, the command-passing and local command execution techniques are utilized to achieve the screen synchronization. A pointer function is also developed to maintain the cursor consistency in a more efficient manner during consultation when a detail indication of the examined image is needed. Besides, a dialog window is also designed for on-line conversation. Since Java programs can run on heterogeneous platforms, the need for system maintenance and user training can be substantially reduced.