Nuclear medicine data communications

Nuclear Medicine was one of the earliest imaging modalities to adopt the use of computers for acquisition, processing, storage, and display of digital images. Originally used for processing images, computer technologies were quickly adopted for image storage, display, and transmission. Modern nuclear medicine cameras produce digital images that can be transmitted over computer networks to other cameras, storage devices, workstations, and printers. In order to achieve nuclear medicine data communication, images must be successfully acquired and transmitted to the appropriate location to be displayed or printed. Standards have been developed over the years to facilitate the creation of interfaces between vendors and equipment, notably the interfile format for nuclear medicine and the DICOM standard for medical images. Studies can be transmitted over network communication links to other sites using telecommunication protocol standards where they can be stored and/or displayed on a wide variety of devices. This ability to move images in a well-understood format to general purpose devices using standard equipment enables the use of the Internet to disseminate nuclear medicine study information over a wide area for clinical use, research, and education. A number of universities have created Internet sites with nuclear medicine teaching files and information. As technology advances, it will be feasible to transmit medical images of all kinds to virtually anyone who needs them in near real-time, without regard to the distance between locations, or the types of instrumentation and computers used. The next few years should prove to be very interesting for digital medical imaging in general and nuclear medicine in particular.