02-22-2006, 11:00 PM
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Developer & Designer, News Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 12,959
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Enhanced Patient Notes on a PDA
"The portability/mobility of casualty diagnostic and medical health data has importance in many potential real-world scenarios, both in civilian and military contexts. Perhaps the most compelling usage scenario for patient data mobility will likely involve the wireless transmission of medical data to mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones to enable medical workers in the field to instantaneously gain access to, view and prognosticate on complex medical visualizations."
A new prototype medical application has been developed using Windows Mobile 5.0's graphical APIs, and it looks great! With the Dell Axim X51v, it's capable of displaying organ models, interactive charts, video simulations, and cross-sectional data. Check it out. 
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02-23-2006, 08:22 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Mar 2005
Posts: 125
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great in theory. but wirelessly transferring that kind of image data with the kind of speed to make it useful for diagnosis in a hospital is still a LONG way off.
A typical CT section can have up to 150 images top to bottom which from our hospital PC's displays very rapidly. on a PPC, this would be
1) small, maybe too small to pick up subtle detail?
2) slow, no way this would ever load hi-res xray/CT/MRI images as fast as a PC.
3) require blanket wireless coverage of the hospital. how many hospitals actually have this???
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02-23-2006, 11:09 AM
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Thinker
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 473
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Some radiology clinics now routinely put a CD of the images into the X-ray film sachet for patients to take home. Last time I burnt a copy of a patient's CD for a presentation for an Abdo CT it was 350Mb.
I very much doubt that kind of traffic would be feasible in a hospital network but obviously for a PPC, there would be serious resizing/compression of images involved. I think viewing films on a PPC would be largely novelty - all the hospital computers have online access to all radiology films/reports (when the damn system is running) which makes PPC access obsoloete.
Nor do I envision our cash-strapped public health system rolling out such a network.
What would be more useful would be a system that lets you order the investigations and view blood results; scribble quick "job-lists" on a ward round wirelessly
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02-23-2006, 01:00 PM
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Neophyte
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 2
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There is a big difference in what image resolution is needed for radiologist reading the scans and other clinicians who just need to see them.
A radiologist needs to see a large high resolution scan which can be as much as 15 mb and needs high network bandwidth, lots of storage and a big high resolution monitors. For a 640 x 480 ppc VGA display which is two colors, you need very little space - as little as a few hundred Kb.
So it can easily be done, and in fact I access images now that are down rez'd to the PPC now and they are very viewable. Would I want my radiologist to read from it?...No. however, they are fine for me when I need to get a handle on a case (a picture is worth a thousand words).
If a full size monitor is available, I would of course prefer that, but If I am away from the hospital and need to see an image, this will do in a pinch.
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02-23-2006, 03:58 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 12
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Thanks very much for everyone's comments; we see this as being potentially very useful for presenting information to other clinicians (e.g. referring clinicians), and also for the information of the patient themselves and for their medical information portability. I would support what sdrexler says in respect to the difference between the kinds of images usable by a radiologist and other clinicians. Also, this is actually targeted at 3G Smart Phones, although we're using a x51v here since there currently aren't a whole lot of WM5-based phones with 2D/3D graphics acceleration (zero at my last count). So the software would reside on a phone with (potentially) 2mbps download speeds, and it's assumed that the images would be pre-processed for use in this context.
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Linear Mode
