iPhone Browses Diagnostic Heart Images and Videos

Has it been a month since the iPhone was released? I cannot believe the number of products and services that are being made available. Maybe it will be the iPod of the cell phone world! SV

Heart Imaging Technologies (HeartIT) announced today that medical images can be viewed on Apple’s new iPhone. (See examples at http://www.heartit.com.) Physicians can simply click on a web link sent via email by one of their colleagues, enter their password, and, for example, instantly view movies of a patient’s beating heart halfway around the world. They can even put their colleagues on speakerphone and carry on a medical consultation while simultaneously browsing through the imaging results.

Viewing medical images traditionally requires dedicated workstations costing tens of thousands of dollars, which in turn are connected to proprietary picture archiving communications and storage (PACS) systems costing millions of dollars more. 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.