WORLD-WIDE-WEB INTERFACE TO DIGITAL IMAGING AND COMMUNICATION IN MEDICINE-CAPABLE IMAGE SERVERS

As a trial project, the Indiana University Department of Radiology has developed a low-cost manner of distributing radiological images throu ghout a medical environment using the World Wide Web (WWW). The interf ace requires the user to have a WWW-browser client, such as Netscape, running on UNIX, PC, or Macintosh platforms. A forms-based interface a llows the user to query several DICOM-capable machines at the machine, patient, study, series, and image revels. Once an image transfer is i nitiated, images are prewindowed from 16- to 8-bits, compressed using public domain Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) compression routi nes, transferred to the WWW client program, and decompressed and displ ayed using a locally selected image viewing program. At the currently implemented level of compression (75% quality), the entire fetch-trans form-JPEG-display process takes 2 to 5 seconds over Ethernet, dependin g on the platform used. Copyright (C) 1996 by W.B. Saunders Company