A COMPUTATIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR TELEMEDICINE

Emerging telemedicine applications require the ability to exploit dive rse and geographically distributed resources. Highspeed networks are u sed to integrate advanced visualization devices, sophisticated instrum ents, large databases, archival storage devices, PCs, workstations, an d supercomputers. This form of telemedical environment is similar to n etworked virtual supercomputers, also known as metacomputers. Metacomp uters are already being used in many scientific application areas. In this article, we analyze requirements necessary for a telemedical comp uting infrastructure and compare them with requirements found in a typ ical metacomputing environment. We will show that metacomputing enviro nments can be used to enable a more powerful and unified computational infrastructure for telemedicine. The Globus metacomputing toolkit can provide the necessary low level mechanisms to enable a large scale te lemedical infrastructure. The Globus toolkit components are designed i n a modular fashion and can be extended to support the specific requir ements for telemedicine. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.