Recording and reenactment of collaborative diagnosis sessions using DICOM

This paper presents a radiological collaborative tool capable of direct manipulation of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) images on both sides, and also recording and reenacting of a recorded session. A special collaborative application protocol formerly developed was extended and used as basis for the development of collaborative session recording and playback processes. The protocol is used today for real-time radiological meetings through the Internet. This new standard for collaborative sessions makes possible other uses for the protocol, such as asynchronous collaborative sessions, decision regulation, auditing, and educational applications. Experimental results are given which compare this protocol with other popular collaborative approaches. Comparison of these results shows that the proposed protocol performs much better than other approaches when run under controlled conditions.