A novel tele-medical environment appropriate for use in tele-advisory and tele-surgery cases.
Tele-medical systems have been recently introduced in the field of networking as promising applications that can significantly improve the offering of medical treatment by providing services such as tele-advising, tele-surgery and remote monitoring in places where the presence of doctors or any medical specialists is difficult or time consuming. Some already existent networking models can be used for the establishment of a connection between the communicating sides. The offered network's security is also a significant factor. The present paper describes a software environment implementing a particular aspect of a tele-medical system. The developed system includes features such as direct communication between doctors and medical assistants, medical information acquisition and storing and high band information transfer in real-time. TCP/IP point-to-point protocol has been used for the implementation of the non bandwidth-critical connections. The application introduces novel features with the use of ATM connection for supporting the time-critical service of video transfer to and from the medical database.