A superhighway network to exchange cardiac images in a metropolitan area

The delivery of health care and sharing of medical information over a distance using telecommunication systems involve a diverse set of clinical, educational and research applications and an equally set of diverse technologies The technological basis and the practical issues are highly variable from one clinical application to another Moreover, if the information to be exchanged involves images, a special problem in cardiology is how to handle full motion video echocardiograms and cine angiograms. In the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, Brazi,l a set of Research Institutions have been working in a project as part of a national effort to provide a very high performance backbone using ATM links This project is ba,sed on image servers which can store, send and receive images using the DICOM 3.0 protocol. This superhighway and the applications are currently being validated between the two major hospitals in the metropolitan area of Sao Paulo, Brazil.