1997 AMIA's Spring Congress abstract




National Library of Medicine Teleradiology Project


As new medical technology is developed, we must evaluate its performance to learn from the enterprise. Even a short exposure to the physicians and other health care personnel who provide primary care to rural and other remote areas in the United States will convince an observer of the high level of committment, dedication, and competence demonstrated by the vast majority of these persons. The same can be stated for medical personnel at regional referral centers. However, our health care system frequently fails to provide these professionals with essential support services. The result is patients are transferred from their local primary care sites to a regional referral center, not because the local primary medical personnel cannot adequately manage the patient; but because there is a lack of timely support services such as radiological or other subspecialty consultation. Even regional referal centers frequently lack the most sophisticated diagnostic support tools including powerful image processing and diagnostic visulatization software and subspecialist consultation which can be of great utility in complex and challenging cases.

As part of a grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), we will be using the Iowa Communication Network (ICN) to provide medical professionals with advanced image processing and visualization tools. We hope that enabling medical professionals to use extremely sophisticated edge of the art diagnostic support services will minimize the need for their patients to be sent to large tertiary or academic centers just for these diagnostic support services. As part of the NLM grant, we are developing a clinically useful workstation and software that integrates image diagnostic display capabilities with sophisticated image analysis tools featuring distributed, network-based, real-time interactive consultation. We are also developing multimedia tutorials to provide education on volumetric imaging and analysis to physicians and technologists at local primary care and regional referal sites. In addition to providing our own imaging protocols, we would like to make this a location where others can publish their imaging and image analysis protocols as well.



NLM Project Overview Information is provided in layers of increasing details about our National Library of Medicine supported quantitative visualization / teleradiology project


Application Specific Tutorials Enter here to find detailed overviews, case studies, bibliographic lists with online abstracts, scanning protocols and specific approaches to image quantitation and visualization focused on areas of pathophysiology in which quantitative volumetric imaging can play an important role in establishing diagnoses and helping to develop management scenarios

Software for Establishing Teleradiologic Links for Quantitative Volumetric Imaging Consultation These pages provide an overview and full manual for the network-based, image-based remote consultation

Volumetric Image Formation, Display, and Analysis These pages provide an overview of and full manual for our quantitative image analysis software package, VIDA. Our approach to quantitative teleradiology blends VIDA with software for network-based, image-based remote consultation

Medical Infomatics Course Based upon a generous equipment grant from Hewlett Packard, we are teaching a series of didactic and project oriented classes designed to demonstrate the network based application in biomedical computing. A specific goal is to bring on board a next generation of engineers to help design the biomedical computing environment of the future. ( A password is needed to view these pages due to copyrighted materials.)


The Virtual Hospital A University of Iowa based online informational resource for both patients and healthcare providers offering "just-in-time healthcare information" and discussions on a variety of health care issues



[detailed weekly statistics] Weekly access statistics from rural test sites





©1994-99 Division of Physiologic Imaging, Dept. of Radiology, Univ. of Iowa


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