![]() |
6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999 |
A123
The application of different telepathology procedures appears now
gradually in medical practice. To improve health care and to gain economical
savings requires system solutions with the full exploitation of telepathology
possibilities promoting the formation of telepathology networks with
participants offering and requesting services in pathology. The HISTKOM
family of telepathology equipment and software includes now all components
of such a network: - HISTKOM - Telemicroscopy: equipment to perform frozen
section service - HISTKOM - Teleconsult: equipment to carry out
"store and forward" as well as interactive 2nd opinion cooperation.
- HISTKOM - Network: Secure Intranet within the public ISDN telephone net
with access, identification, authorization, and encryption by chip-card
technology. - HISTKOM - Electronic Investigation document:
common data interchange format containing text, graphics
and images for documentation, archiving and electronic mailing which
is common to all documents. Open interfaces to the mentioned investigation
protocol provide means to integrate it via software interfaces to existing
hospital information systems (HIS). A second interface provides a translation
of the document to the HTML format of the "World Wide Web". Under the
restrictions of a reduced data confidentiality, this document can be sent
over the Internet to everybody connected to it. The HTML document can be
read with every standard browser, no special software is necessary. The
intention to install such networks implies that all system components be
evaluated thoroughly. This has been done and is continued with selected
partners in a three years fieldtest period. The evaluation was with respect
to comfort of application, image quality, quality of diagnoses and
naturally technical safety. Fieldtests have been carried out with material
from histology, cytology and hematology. The outcome of all tests
(about 12 with about 1000 cases) revealed that image quality and comfort
of operation is well accepted by the users; the diagnoses rendered with
telepathology equipment were comparable to those rendered with the
microscope directly; the training period for the new tool can be restricted
to some 20 specimens.
HISTKOM - AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION FOR TELEPATHOLOGY
Schwarzmann P, Binder B, Käser M, Klose R
Inst. Physikalische Elektronik der Univserität Stuttgart, Germany