Loosely coupled workstations in a radiological image information system

This paper presents the work done by the research group of the University of Florence within the context of the TELEMED Project. TELEMED aims at developing a pilot application for experiencing Integrated Broadband Networks for transmitting medical, anatomical and radiological information. A large part of the project consists in the development of a multisite Image Reference Data Base (IRDB), a database containing radiological images (and associated information) approved by a scientific committee because of their particular interest. The overall architecture is based on a set of IRDB installations which are accessed from Viewing Stations (VS) located at the different partners sites. A viewing station is a workstation whose software provides special functionalities to support the presentation of images coming from IRDB. The IRDB is based on a Server Interface that provides services for accessing information contained in a Relational Database as well as images contained in a Bulk Storage. The interaction between VS and IRDB follows the client/server paradigm and uses an OSI Level-7 protocol, named Telemed Communication Language (TCL). This protocol makes the client-server dialog independent of the underlying communication subsystem, which may be as simple as a LAN or as complex as a transnational communication link. Both IRDB and VS are implemented on workstation-class machines, running UNIX. An Ethernet LAN connects the viewing stations to the IRDB, thus implementing a loosely coupled workstations system.