A RESTful image gateway for multiple medical image repositories

Mobile technologies are increasingly important components in telemedicine systems and are becoming powerful decision support tools. Universal access to data may already be achieved by resorting to the latest generation of tablet devices and smartphones. However, the protocols employed for communicating with image repositories are not suited to exchange data with mobile devices. In this paper, we present an extensible approach to solving the problem of querying and delivering data in a format that is suitable for the bandwidth and graphic capacities of mobile devices. We describe a three-tiered component-based gateway that acts as an intermediary between medical applications and a number of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). The interface with the gateway is accomplished using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests following a Representational State Transfer (REST) methodology, which relieves developers from dealing with complex medical imaging protocols and allows the processing of data on the server side.