NUCLEAR-MEDICINE DATA COMMUNICATIONS

Nuclear Medicine was one of the earliest imaging modalities to adopt t he use of computers for acquisition, processing, storage, and display of digital images. Originally used far processing Images, computer tec hnologies were quickly adapted for image storage, display, and transmi ssion. Modern nuclear medicine cameras produce digital images that can be transmitted over computer networks to other cameras, storage devic es, workstations, and printers, In order to achieve nuclear medicine d ata communication, images must be successfully acquired and transmitte d to the appropriate location to be displayed or printed. Standards ha ve been developed over the years to facilitate the creation of interfa ces between vendors and equipment, notably the interfile format for nu clear medicine and the DICOM standard for medical images. Studies can be transmitted over network communication links to other sites using t elecommunication protocol standards where they can be stored and/or di splayed on a wide variety of devices.This ability to move images in a well-understood format to general purpose devices using standard equip ment enables the use of the Internet to disseminate nuclear medicine s tudy information over a wide area for clinical use, research, anal edu cation. A number of universities have created Internet sites with nucl ear medicine teaching files and information, as technology advances, i t will be feasible to transmit medical images of all kinds to virtuall y anyone who needs them in near real-time, without regard to the dista nce between locations, or the types of instrumentation and computers u sed. The next few years should prove to be very interesting for digita l medical imaging in general and nuclear medicine in particular. Copyr ight (C) 1998 by W.B. Saunders Company.