Report of a national neurosurgical teleradiology system

Abstract

An emergency neurosurgical teleradiology system was initially installed in two referring hospitals in Ireland to transmit images to the neurosurgical department in Cork. It was subsequently expanded to six major referring hospitals transmitting to both neurosurgical departments in Ireland serving the entire population of 3.5 million people, effectively becoming a national teleradiology system. The system was based on PCs interconnected by leased data circuits and ISDN. The network was operational 24 hours a day. Over 750 emergency computerized tomography scans were transmitted and transmission failures occurred in only 6% of cases. We conclude that current PC technology can be used to form a peer-to-peer wide-area network upon which a robust emergency teleradiology system can be based.