High speed satellite access to biomedical text/image databases

This paper describes a satellite-mediated experiment in accessing biomedical databases. The experimental tool is MIRS, a prototype client/server, SQL-based system for the retrieval and display of medical information from mixed text/image databases. We have installed the MIRS client at the Laboratory for Radiological Informatics at the University of California at San Francisco and the MIRS server in our Image Processing Laboratory at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). We have run the MIRS client to do database queries and access images over a T-1 satellite link. Our initial performance evaluation has yielded results which relate to the ability of client/server systems such as MIRS to perform effectively over geosynchronous satellite links. We have developed an application-level method that allows for the efficient use of the standard TCP protocol. We have evaluated this method on the T-1 link provided by the NASA geosynchronous ACTS, and measured faster delivery of cervical spine x-ray images by a factor of 2.7:1, as compared to conventional FTP