Extending OSI protocols to support medical imaging services

Abstract-The recent advances in the design of computer-based medical systems offer to a patient the feasibility to be independent on the knowledge of a local doctor. Computer terminals in hospitals are now available to access and manage one patient´s data in order to assure appropriate medication. This paper describes a software communication architecture for medical imaging services. The proposed architecture comprises of a communication protocol and an Application Program Interface (API). The implemented protocol was designed in agreement with the full OSI stack of higher layers´ protocols already standardized. Based on this notion, an OSI-like interface was developed able to provide Telemedicine Network Services (TNS) to Telemedicine users and facilitate the writing of medical applications. The main aspects of the interface are provision of a set of services similar to that defined in the standards by CCITT and ISO known as Association Control Service Element (ACSE) and Remote Operation Service Element (ROSE), usage of TCP/IP communication platform or any other transport protocol, reliability in medical data transmission as a particular implemented Telemedicine File Transfer (TFT) supports the image-file features. The interface between medical applications and TCP/IP connection-oriented platform is referred to as the TNS interface and can be considered to lie in the application, presentation and session layers. The software components of the TNS interface were built on the OS/2 operating system which runs on the medical workstations. In the prototype system around 1 Mbit/s throughput was obtained for an image-file transfer implementing a client-server interaction, on an Ethernet 802.3 LAN.