Medical image data retrieval and manipulation through the WWW

Modern health care delivery relies heavily on digital imaging technologies, which provide powerful tools for diagnosis, treatment and surgery. Many picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) have been developed for medical image acquisition, archiving, communication, retrieval, processing, distribution and display. However, current PACS systems usually require dedicated hardware licensed software and considerable maintenance. The retrieval and manipulation of medical image data are therefore fairly expensive, complex and inconvenient. The authors presented a prototype Web-based system which enables efficient retrieval and manipulation of digital medical image data on a much wider scale and at much lower cost than existing systems.