A multimedia medical communication link between a radiology department and an emergency department

Abstract

The most critical aspect of a radiologist's work is communicating his findings to the attending physician responsible for the patient's care. This is also the part of the process that is least well organized and the most subject to failure. At the University of Ottawa Medical Communications Research Centre we are investigating technical means to improving communications between radiologists and attending physicians. We first introduce the radiology communication service problem and show why it is essentially a multimedia communication problem. We then briefly describe a multimedia communication system designed and implemented by our research team. The multimedia system consists of several work stations linked by the Hospital's local area network (LAN). Each physician work station comprises a Compaq 386/20-Mhz microcomputer with 16 Mbytes of RAM, a 500-Mbyte image disk, and an image memory that drives a 1,000-line menochrome monitor. The images are digitized using a Konica laser-based film digitizer (2430 by 2000 10-bit pixels for a standard chest radiograph). The multimedia file server manager station is built around a PC-AT compatible with a Northern Telecom Meridian SL-1ST digital PBX and a Meridian Mail digital voice messaging system. This last device is used to store voice data and is linked via the PBX to the workstations' digital telephones. A Sytek 6,000 LAN links all work stations to the file server. All data, image, and graphic information is transmitted via this network, while the twisted pair connections linking the digital PBX to the telephone sets are used for transmitting voice data. Finally, we provide details of an inhospital trial linking the Department of Radiological Sciences and the Emergency Department at the Ottawa Civic Hospital, a 950-bed tertiary care teaching hospital. © 1989 W.B. Saunders Company.