View medical images on iPhone
25 July 2007
Heart Imaging
Technologies (HeartIT) has announced that medical images can now be viewed on
Apple's new iPhone.
Physicians
can simply click on a web link on the phone sent via email by one of their colleagues,
enter their password, and view medical images. They can even put their colleagues
on speakerphone and carry on a medical consultation while simultaneously
browsing through the imaging results. HeartIT has developed a system,
called WebPAX, based on web technologies that allows DICOM-based imaging to
be viewed on devices with a web browser.
 Viewing medical images traditionally requires dedicated
expensive workstations, which in turn are connected to very expensive proprietary
picture archiving communications and storage (PACS) systems. In order to view medical images, physicians must literally
drive or walk to one of these workstations. Recent advances in World Wide
Web browser technologies and the web sites that utilize their rich features,
collectively referred to as Web 2.0, are challenging these expensive and
cumbersome proprietary approaches.
Medical images displayed in a web browser have previously been of lower
quality and therefore had limited diagnostic utility. This technology is the
first to provide physicians with the ability to drill-down and view medical
images, including movies, on a hand-held device.
"Patient privacy is obviously a critically important issue on the internet,"
said Brent Reed, HeartIT's Director of Software Development. "Fortunately,
medical privacy concerns can be addressed using the same encryption
technologies employed by online banking and credit card transactions." To top
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