IMPACT: inter-hospital PACS testbed based on super high definition imaging system and ATM network for tele-diagnosis experiment

An inter-hospital PACS testbed called IMPACT (Inter-hospital Medical Picture Archiving and Communication system for Telemedicine) is constructed. The testbed applies the Super High Definition (SHD) imaging system as a radiological image viewer and 6 Mbps-135 Mbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network to interconnect five medical facilities and NTT R&D Center in and around the Tokyo area. The testbed enables the authors to transmit and display an 8 MB (2048/spl times/2048/spl times/2 byte) chest image in a few seconds without image compression. A tele-diagnosis experiment using the testbed proved the diagnostic routine time can be reduced from a week to a few minutes. This paper reports the system configuration and the experimental results.