Is this sort of radiology data sent over private lines or the public internet? What are the bandwidth demands? Not a good reason for extensive local peering, but a very interesting application. - Dan On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
Thus spake "David Diaz" <techlist@smoton.net>
I agree with everything said Stephen except the part about the medical industry. There are a couple of very large companies doing views over an IP backbone down here. Radiology is very big on networking. They send your films or videos over the network to where the Radiologist is. For example one hospital owns about 6 others down here, and during off hours like weekends etc, the 5 hospitals transmit their films to where the 1 radiologist on duty is.
I meant my reply to be directed only at "telemedecine", where the patient is at home and consults their general practitioner or primary care physician via broadband for things like the flu or a broken arm. While there's lots of talk about this in sci-fi books, there's no sign of this making any significant inroads today, nor does it qualify as a "killer app" for home broadband.
I do work with several medical companies who push radiology etc. around on the back end for resource-sharing and other purposes. This is quite real today, and is driving massive bandwidth upgrades for healthcare providers. However, I don't think it qualifies under most people's idea of telemedecine.
S