A teleradiology architecture featuring security and high performance

DSL or cable modem promise faster teleradiology solutions but require security measures to protect data as it travels over the public Internet. A Virtual private network link may protect data but creates a vulnerability for the hospital intranet. We upload images from the hospital to Web server hosted on the Internet and download them to a PC at the physician's home. Both transfers are protected by the standard SSL Web security protocol. Files can be zipped together for transmission as a unit, with lossless compression as an added benefit. We have measured download times of a few seconds for nuclear medicine studies and a few minutes for a computed tomography study. The proposed solution, which does not require a full-fledged picture archiving and communication system, is adequate for small hospitals or imaging centers.