View medical images on iPhone
25 July 2007
Heart Imaging Technologies (HeartIT) has announced that medical images
can now be viewed on Apple's new iPhone.
Physicians can simply click on a web link on the phone sent via email by
one of their colleagues, enter their password, and view medical images. They
can even put their colleagues on speakerphone and carry on a medical
consultation while simultaneously browsing through the imaging results.
HeartIT has developed a system, called WebPAX, based on web technologies
that allows DICOM-based imaging to be viewed on devices with a web browser.
Viewing
medical images traditionally requires dedicated expensive workstations,
which in turn are connected to very expensive proprietary picture archiving
communications and storage (PACS) systems. In order to view medical images,
physicians must literally drive or walk to one of these workstations. Recent
advances in World Wide Web browser technologies and the web sites that
utilize their rich features, collectively referred to as Web 2.0, are
challenging these expensive and cumbersome proprietary approaches.
Medical images displayed in a web browser have previously been of lower
quality and therefore had limited diagnostic utility. This technology is the
first to provide physicians with the ability to drill-down and view medical
images, including movies, on a hand-held device.
"Patient privacy is obviously a critically important issue on the internet,"
said Brent Reed, HeartIT's Director of Software Development. "Fortunately,
medical privacy concerns can be addressed using the same encryption
technologies employed by online banking and credit card transactions."
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