Networks in nuclear medicine

Computer network hardware and communication protocols are commonplace. Commercially available nuclear medicine computer systems lag behind in their support of network standards. Network hardware and software are mature and stable technologies available for all computers and operating systems. Networks make it practical to optimize the configuration of each computer to a particular task, such as acquiring, processing, viewing, or storing data. This distribution of functions has proven to be economical and operationally robust. It is reasonable to expect that within the next few years, all commercially available computer systems for nuclear medicine will provide the software and hardware support that will make networking computers within a department a practical way of sharing the computational resources of the department.