| One of the medical technologies distinguished for its clinical value is telemedicine. Telemedical systems provide healthcare services at any time and any where irrespective of geographical location. These systems are even more interesting when they provide collaboration among the users (e.g., teleconferencing). Nonetheless, all these systems are not practical for use in clinical workflow unless they are able to communicate with the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). On the other hand, there are many medical imaging applications that are not developed as telemedical systems. A large number of them do not support collaboration and many do not communicate with the PACS and therefore cannot be directly used in clinical workflows.;This thesis also proposes a novel idea to support PACS connectivity. The idea is to use the Digital Imaging and COmmunication in Medicine (DICOM) protocol and enhance transmission time by employing a pair of interfaces and a combination of parallelism and compression methods. This idea speeds up the transmission time of medical images especially over Wide Area Networks (WANs). Experimental results show up to 1.63 speedup over LAN and up to 16.34 speedup over WAN compared to the current method of medical data transmission.;The main advantage of the proposed architecture is that it does not impose any modification to the current medical imaging applications and does not make any assumptions about the underlying architecture or operating system.;This thesis presents an approach based on a three-tier architecture. The architecture and the developed components within it transform medical imaging applications into collaborative, PACS-based, telemedical systems. As a result, current developed medical imaging applications that are not telemedical, do not support collaboration, and do not communicate with PACS, can be enhanced to support collaboration among a group of physicians, be accessed remotely, and be clinically useful. |
