Telemammography: implementation issues.

Telemammography has the potential to improve access to centralized expertise for the interpretation of breast imaging studies. Digital mammography has more demanding spatial resolution requirements than other forms of medical imaging because of the need to detect microcalcifications, the fine details of lesion margins, and subtle architectural distortion. The resolution requirements for mammography have important implications for image acquisition and display technologies. The large size of the resulting image data sets places significant demands on local and wide area networks as well as storage media. Image data compression will be particularly important for telemammography to help make systems practical and affordable. This article describes how existing technologies can be adapted to implement telemammography systems in the near future.