Della Mea V, Beltrami C A
Department of Pathology, University of Udine, Italy.
Med Inform (Lond). 1998 Jul-Sep;23(3):237-44. doi: 10.3109/14639239809001404.
Telepathology is based on the sharing of medical images coming from the microscope, and comprises different applications: intra-operative telediagnosis, second opinion teleconsultation, reference case archives, remote data and image processing, quality assessment. Since the Internet is available worldwide, it can be of interest to define which of these tasks can be performed by means of some telepathology method based on it. This paper focuses particularly on the use of Internet multimedia electronic mail for exchanging multimedia cases. To test the validity of the proposed approach for transmission of multimedia cases, the first step is to evaluate its diagnostic accuracy. Trials involving the transmission of 299 cases have been carried out between two departments of Pathology in Italy (at the University of Udine and at the City Hospital of Trento, respectively) in order to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy as well as the time needed for acquisition and transmission. First results show that good diagnostic agreement can be reached, but the time needed for transmission, generally low, is not sufficiently affordable to be adopted in those cases where time is important. In particular, telepathology through multimedia e-mail can be adopted for second opinion consultation, remote image processing, quality assessment and continuing education possibly by means of software that integrates acquisition and delivery of cases with HIS functionalities.
远程病理学基于来自显微镜的医学图像共享，包括不同的应用：术中远程诊断、二次诊断远程会诊、参考病例档案、远程数据与图像处理、质量评估。由于互联网在全球范围内均可使用，确定这些任务中哪些可以通过基于互联网的某种远程病理学方法来执行可能会很有意义。本文特别关注利用互联网多媒体电子邮件来交换多媒体病例。为了测试所提出的多媒体病例传输方法的有效性，第一步是评估其诊断准确性。在意大利的两个病理科（分别位于乌迪内大学和特伦托市立医院）之间进行了涉及299例病例传输的试验，以评估诊断准确性以及采集和传输所需的时间。初步结果表明，可以达成良好的诊断一致性，但传输所需的时间通常较短，在时间很重要的情况下，其成本效益不足以被采用。特别是，通过多媒体电子邮件进行的远程病理学可用于二次诊断会诊、远程图像处理、质量评估以及继续教育，可能借助将病例采集和交付与医院信息系统功能集成的软件来实现。
