TELEPATHOLOGY APPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNET MULTIMEDIA ELECTRONIC MAIL

Telepathology is based on the sharing of medical images coming from th e microscope, and comprises different applications: intra-operative te lediagnosis, second opinion teleconsultation, reference case archives, remote data and image processing, quality assessment. Since the Inter net is available worldwide, it can be of interest to define which of t hese tasks can be performed by means of some telepathology method base d on it. This paper focuses particularly on the use of Internet multim edia electronic mail for exchanging multimedia cases. To test the vali dity of the proposed approach for transmission of multimedia cases, th e first step is to evaluate its diagnostic accuracy. Trials involving the transmission of 299 cases have been carried out between two depart ments of Pathology in Italy (at the University of Udine and at the Cit y Hospital of Trento, respectively) in order to evaluate the diagnosti c accuracy as well as the time needed for acquisition and transmission . First results show that good diagnostic agreement can be reached, bu t the time needed for transmission, generally low, is not sufficiently affordable to be adopted in those cases where time is important. In p articular, telepathology through multimedia e-mail can be adopted for second opinion consultation, remote image processing, quality assessme nt and continuing education possibly by means of software that integra tes acquisition and delivery of cases with HIS functionalities.