MARC (multimedia application for radiologist communications)

The actual trend to integrated services has to be simulated by and accompanied by a group of applications that take profit out of new facilities. Through the paper, a multimedia application oriented to both remote diagnostic and consultation between physicians and specialists is presented. This application is designed to manage medical images (both static and dynamic), and offers edition facilities of multimedia documents (voice, image, text and data), document interchange, videotelephony conferencing and screen synchronization. The multimedia application is a software development made on a UNIX workstation including sound acquisition and reproduction devices within its original hardware, and an attached video camera with an associated DSP card. The user interface is based on the SUN windowing environment called Open Windows, which assists medical staff. The communication was developed using the TCP/IP suite protocols (IP, TCP, UDP), and tested over different local area networks (FDDI, Ethernet) and low speed links (asynchronous line using the SLIP protocol)