Telemedicine is the delivery of medical care to patients anywhere in the world by combining telecommunications and multimedia technologies with medical expertise. Telemedicine has been becoming increasingly possible due to a confluence of ongoing
technical advances in multimedia, imaging, computers, information systems as well as in telecommunications. In this paper, various types of telemedicine and its clinical applications are reviewed, and a state-of-the art multimedia system is
introduced.
Prototype telemedicine workstations have been developed based on this multimedia system. These workstations which are programmable and support high bandwidth telecommunications links up to 155 mbits/s have been used in connecting together
hospitals. To
improve access to high-quality medical care at affordablc cost, the system has been designed to support various telemedicine and consultation functions to collaboratively transfer, manipulate, and view images, video, audio, and text Based on our
experience andlessons leamed in developing hardware and software for telemedicine workstations using multimedia systems and integrating them with the information superfighway, we have defined general technical requirements for future
clinically-acceptable telemedicine systems in terms of media acquisitions, media storage, compression/decompression, image and video processing, user interface, network interfaces, and network protocel.
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