CyclopsDistMedDB - a transparent gateway for distributed medical data access in DICOM format

The image diagnosis area is the biggest medical field in telemedicine, because it does not obligate a direct contact of the patient with the responsible radiologist during the building of the report. The persistent lack of specialists in places distant from urban centers makes telemedicine an important tool for the improvement of healthcare services. In this paper, we present a framework, called CyclopsDistMedDB (Cyclops Distributed Medical Database), for the integration of distributed DICOM medical record databases over wide areas. The system has a central module that is responsible for receiving the clients' requests about patient data (images, waveforms), performing the querying and retrieval of images, patient records, etc. from the specific DICOM databases containing the data requested, and delivering them to the clients. The data communication protocols adopted are DICOM, for retrieval of objects directly from the DICOM data servers, and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), for the delivery of DICOM data to client applications.