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6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999 |
A034
The most challenging aspect of telepathology and telemedicine in general
is the formation of networks incorporating large user communities, exchanging
all types of information. Developers of telepathology equipment need to
provide solutions enabling the user to make his daily routine work easier
and more effective. Therefore, the interoperability problem between equipment
of different manufacturers has to be solved. Having in mind these necessities
the EU has launched the EUROPATH project within which a telepathology network
is promoted. The telepathology network will contain passive and active
telemicroscopy for participants requesting and offering all types of
services in pathology, including data base concepts, quality control
services and programs for continuing education. As already a lot of equipment
exists, the idea of the project is to provide several software interfaces and
data formats, to which manufacturers of equipment can design their own
implementations, thus becoming compatible to other devices which also provide
these interfaces. Existing standards (data transmission channels like ISDN,
ATM etc., Internet technologies like TCP/IP, SMTP, MIME and HTML) will be
applied where possible. In the first phase 3 components have been defined:
types of services in telepathology, a universal interface to operate remotely
controllable microscopes (VMI "Virtual Microscope Interface") and a special
document folder to archive and transfer text, images and further data. In the
VMI activities, two major microscope manufacturers (Leica and Zeiss)
participate. The definition includes all functions of the new fully computer
controllable microscopes. The data and image folder is defined for both,
the application of the HTML format to be compatible with the Internet world
and the DICOM VL standard to be compatible with the world of the PACS systems.
INTEROPERABILITY WITHIN A EUROPEAN TELEPATHOLOGY NETWORK
Binder B, Schwarzmann P, Klose R
Inst.Physikalische Elektronik, Univ.Stuttgart, Germany