An Agile Framework to Support Distributed Medical Imaging Scenarios

Healthcare institutions are increasingly taking advantage of telemedicine to create collaborative workspaces. However, the continuous production of medical data requires higher performance from infrastructures, to maintain or even enhance the quality of service. On the other hand, a tremendous amount of ubiquitous computational power and an unprecedented number of Internet resources and services are used every day as a normal commodity. This paper presents a Cloud-based telemedicine framework that allows applications to store data and communicate easily, using any Cloud provider. From this framework, two medical imaging applications were developed to provide standard services with high abstraction level: a medical imaging repository and an inter-institutional communications platform. Furthermore, a telemedicine case study is presented, namely a regional repository, where the physicians can review medical studies from anywhere and at any time.