IMAGENCIES: network image services for telemedicine applications

A network of distributed image-based medical services (Imagencies) is proposed. Each one is a community of specialised, co-operating programs (Imagents), providing acquisition, processing, archiving and management facilities. Both synchronous and asynchronous communication are proposed, based on the standard protocols available on the Internet. We describe a prototype implementation in the field of telepathology. At present, the Imagency includes a secretary and an image processing specialist; asynchronous communication is realised by the standard MIME protocol for multimedia electronic mail. Practical results and future perspectives are presented and discussed.