Collaboration system for radiology workstations.

Consultation between radiologists and referring physicians is part of routine medical practice. Nevertheless, a typical picture archiving and communication system contains no provision that will allow this critical interaction to occur on-line. The authors describe an image viewing system designed for real-time interactive consultation over the Internet. The system has two main components: an image viewer and a collaboration server. The image viewer connects to the collaboration server over an Internet-compatible network. Once the image viewer is connected, its display can be synchronized with that of another connected image viewer, so that radiologists can point out image findings and diagnoses in real time to remotely located physicians. The image viewer can retrieve images from any DICOM-compatible archive. In addition to standard image manipulation functions, the image viewer contains a new user interface for image annotation. Developed specifically for medical imaging, this user interface is activated by mouse actions instead of conventional on-screen controls, greatly improving the ease with which annotations can be created. The collaboration system is based on a simple yet flexible programming interface that can be readily generalized to other types of collaborative applications. The system was developed with the Java programming language because of Java's integrated support of Internet-compatible networking capabilities.