An object oriented multi-modality display and analysis system incorporating DICOM3

Over the last few years there have been considerable changes in health care systems world wide. One of the reasons for these changes has been real advances in medical technology, particularly in relation to information technology. The authors address some of the key issues related to the implementation of such technology. The areas of information technology applied to health care where change is expected to be especially rapid are: transmission; data storage and retrieval. The current situation is that there is only limited transmission of data, images, text etc. between departments within a hospital. (The exceptions to this rule are a number of advanced clinical departments in major medical centres like Johns Hopkins and UCSF.) In the near future this will change with the more general introduction of local area networks i.e. picture archiving and communication systems or PACS. This will be extended to wide area networks (WANS) by the use of commercial telecommunications media.<>