The rural and global medical informatics consortium and network for radiology services

Telemedicine systems that provide health delivery services to rural clinics and hospitals are being demonstrated in clinical settings. This paper summarizes the research and consortia projects at the University of Arizona Medical Center. The paper describes the Rural and Global Picture Archiving and Communications (PACS) environment developed under a National Science Foundation grant. The Rural and Global PACS environment includes many workstations, database, and networking components and is treated as a large distributed system. These components are described in this paper. The multimedia services for radiology provided by the Rural and Global PACS are described and their performance is measured. Finally, the current research work using the Open Software Foundation's distributed computing environment (OSF DCE) services is described. An OSF DCE testbed for the Rural and Global PACS is described and the rationale of using OSF DCE in the project is presented.