Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput – Computer conferencing – Demand based messaging
Reexamination Certificate
1998-11-25
2002-07-23
Dinh, Dung C. (Department: 2153)
Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomput
Computer conferencing
Demand based messaging
C709S218000, C345S215000, C382S128000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06424996
ABSTRACT:
NOTICE OF COPYRIGHT
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to the transfer of multimedia information through the Internet, and more particularly to an integrated e-mail and server system for manipulating and communicating medical information.
BACKGROUND
In many fields (e.g., medicine, manufacturing, veterinary science, scientific research, etc.), it is often necessary to examine a subject and communicate the results of the examination to a remote place. Such information exchanges are especially desirable in the medical arena where it is often useful for medical practitioners to communicate medical information, such as patient test results, to other practitioners located in remote places. Telemedicine facilitates this exchange of information.
Telemedicine is an emerging field that enables medical knowledge to be shared amongst a variety of users that need not be co-located. Interest in telemedicine has exploded in the 1990's with the development of medical devices for capturing data in digital electronic form and the establishment of high speed, high bandwidth telecommunication systems around the world. In particular, the use of the Internet in telemedicine allows a practitioner at one location to interpret medical test results and consult with another practitioner located elsewhere. Medical information transfer systems that employ the Internet allow for remote locations, such as third world countries that do not have an attending specialist, to access such medical expertise. Furthermore, emergency care may be provided where a practitioner is temporarily away, e.g., at home or on vacation. See, e.g., Thrall JH, Boland G., “Telemedicine in practice”, Seminars in Nuclear Medicine 28(2):145-57, April 1998.
Medical information (e.g., as may be utilized by a telemedicine system) may be derived from many different medical modalities. Such modalities may include sophisticated radiology equipment grouped as small matrix size and large matrix size instruments. Small matrix systems include equipment for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), ultrasonography (US), nuclear medicine (NM) and digital fluorography. Large matrix systems include equipment for computer radiography (CR) and digitized radiography (DR). Other data image acquisition equipment may be used for radiofluoroscopy, angiography, such as x-ray angiography and heart scanning. Still other equipment of great usefulness in acquiring medical information includes secondary capture devices for video, endoscopy, microscopy, and photography, such as digital cameras, scanners, electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, and the like.
The resulting medical information may take numerous forms, including text, images and video, or variations thereof, such as image overlay data, measurements, coordinates, etc. Information may also be in the form of time-dependent data including sound, such as audio dictation, and waveform data. The data may be static representations of timedependent forms, such as curves. Thus, it is advantageous for telemedicine systems that may need to transfer the data and/or information to be flexible, so as to accommodate this variety of information/data from multiple modalities.
Unfortunately, this type of flexibility is not exhibited in current systems. For example, some current medical information transfer systems have integrated medical modalities to not only generate data but also to capture data signals, to store the data and to transmit the data over the Internet. Typically, in such systems the modality has an integrated Web server, storage database and Web pages as physical parts of the modality system. A remote Web browser is allowed to request data from the modality through the Internet (e.g., via the World Wide Web) and the Web server in the modality is allowed to respond accordingly. One such system, which has restricted applicability to ultrasound machines, is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,715,823.
One drawback of such systems is that individual Web servers are required for each medical modality unit, making it a costly endeavor to share data among a number of practitioners. Furthermore, each server is limited in use to only the attached type of medical modality.
Other systems for transferring medical files are adapted to accept data from a variety of modalities, but require an interface to convert data into transferable signals. One such system described in WO 98/24358 converts system binary file data from a modality to a compatible file of keystroke codes using an adapter. The codes are transferred to a computer, which converts the codes to American Standard Code for Information Interchange (“ASCII”) characters for transmission over the Internet to a host computer. This multiple file conversion process is an unnecessary burden, however, as current Internet technology does not require that information be converted into ASCII format. Presently, the Internet accepts binary Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (“EBCDIC”) and ASCII codes. Thus, an ASCII adapter is now an unnecessary extra device for transmitting medical data.
In addition to simply receiving the medical information, it is often important that a practitioner receive the information in a timely manner, especially where a quick diagnosis needs to be rendered for patient care. Thus, it is advantageous for telemedicine systems to rapidly transfer medical data. As noted, some current telemedicine systems rely on the Internet (i.e., as accessed through its graphically-oriented user interface, the World Wide Web) to transfer information. However, current Web-based transfer systems often suffer from long delays in downloading Web pages having complex data, such as large images. This presents a particular problem for the rapid sharing of medical information as a typical MRI study, for example, may have over 100 images, each of which may be 300 to 500 Kb in size, loading to a study of 50 to 80 Mb total.
These transfer times may be enhanced by compression of the data prior to transmission over the Internet. Traditional compression schemes (e.g., JPEG, GIF and bitmap schemes), however, tend to operate at low efficiencies. Such low compression efficiency may only provide for transfer of simple data before significant resolution losses and/or the truncation of data segments is/are experienced. With the use of high efficiency compression methodologies, such as wavelet compression techniques, transfer times can be reduced twenty fold. Unfortunately, however, the use of such high compression efficiency schemes is not prevalent among current telemedicine systems.
Another approach to solving the dilemma of lengthy transfer times is with the use of electronic mail (“e-mail”). E-mail provides a user with apparently instant transfer times, because information is sent as a package in advance. Using e-mail, studies may be “pushed” to the user so that the files are already available at the user's computer when the user is ready to view the data. By contrast, when a user requests a Web page through a browser, each page must be separately downloaded.
Some current e-mail technologies allow for the point-to-point transfer of a variety of data from different modalities. However, these systems do not operate with a central storage system. Without a server database, the operations are limited. For example, one may not retrieve information about how multiple images relate to one another. Such relationship information is essential for studying data from certain modalities, such as radiology images, and is required for compliance with some medical industry standards, e.g., the multi-specialty DICOM Standards (as originally published by an ACR-NEMA committee spon
Foard, IV Lawrence
Killcommons Peter M.
Blakely , Sokoloff, Taylor & Zafman LLP
Dinh Dung C.
Nexsys Electronics, Inc.
LandOfFree
Medical network system and method for transfer of information does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Medical network system and method for transfer of information, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Medical network system and method for transfer of information will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-2867094