Synchronized medical image viewer for remote consultation

Abstract

The collaborative analysis between radiologists and surgeons of digitized medical images in the surgical planning phase is a critical step in the process of patient treatment. The shortage of radiologists who are qualified to carry out this task has proven detrimental to patient care. The proposed solution is a tool for collaboration where a radiologist and a surgeon are able to analyze scans while being in geographically disparate locations. Though a superficial examination of the options currently available would suggest the use of an off-the-shelf desktop sharing software solution, these fall well short of the performance and quality requirements of such an application which is to be used in a medical setting. We propose a novel approach, based on low-level command capturing that enables near-real-time synchronization with zero loss of information or distortion of the images. We discuss the underlying technology of our implementation of the synchronization solution as well as present the manifest performance gains of our solution in comparison with the highly popular commercial desktop sharing solution TeamViewer.