World Wide Web interface to digital imaging and communication in medicine-capable image servers

As a trial project, the Indiana University Department of Radiology has develop[ed a low-cost manner of distributing radiological images throughout a medical environment using the World Wide Web (WWW). The interface requires the user to have a WWW-browser client, such as Netscape, running on UNIX, PC, or Macintosh platforms. A forms-based interface allows the user to query several DICOM-capable machines at the machine, patient, study, series, and image levels. Once an image transfer is initiated, images are prewindowed from 16- to 8-bits, compressed using public domain Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) compression routines, transferred to the WWW client program, and decompressed and displayed using a locally selected image viewing program. At the currently implemented level of compression (75% quality), the entire fetch-transform-JPEG-display process takes 2 to 5 seconds over Ethernet, depending on the platform used.