6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A034
INTEROPERABILITY WITHIN A EUROPEAN TELEPATHOLOGY NETWORK
Binder B, Schwarzmann P, Klose R

Inst.Physikalische Elektronik, Univ.Stuttgart, Germany

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.