Image bank, diagnostic codification and telediagnosis in hematology

Recent technological improvements which permit transmission and discussion of color images with good resolution and in real time may become very useful for hematological and histopathological applications. The workstations used a PC Pentium, 16 Mo RAM 1,6 Go of hard disk, including a laser-reader for CD-ROM and network cards. Applications are developed under Windows 95. The system allows to digitalize, compress and decompress any kind of colored or black and white images according to the International Norms, JPEG. The storage is managed by a specific software according to specific classification for diagnostic nomenclature. It can store typical, less typical and atypical images of examples of pathology which can contribute to the constitution of a digitized bank of images and CD-ROM. The system used have been launched to allow pathology image transmission on ISDN networks for diagnosis assessment. Standardization of nomenclature which has been achieved both for immunophenotyping and cytogenetics is necessary for the cyto-anatomical lesions in the specialized field of hematology. In using the major published recommendations (FAB, EGIL, REAL etc.), a comprehensive approach of nomenclature for our image data base is proposed through a 500 item Thesaurus, which have been written simultaneously as a multilangage version.