New strategies for medical imaging and networking

In order to develop strategies powerful enough to encompass both current and future requirements in diagnostic imaging, it is necessary to understand the different segments of the process. These segments relate to the acquisition, compression, storage, transmission, manipulation and cross-modality correlation of image data. A brief synopsis of these different segments is presented, followed by a discussion of the key concepts that must be contained in any strategy for the future. This strategy represents the integrating principles behind a wide, possibly worldwide, medical imaging network which the authors call MEDINET