Modern aircraft carriers may be mechanical wonders, but alone somewhere in the 70 million square miles of Pacific Ocean, they are medically more isolated than any remote village. Results from the George Washington experiment offer abundant evidence of the value of teleradiology for the fleet. Problems of bandwidth and storage were addressed by a compression scheme. Without data compression, digital x-rays acquired and stored in matrices of more than 2K x 2K pixels require 4 to 8 MB per image and can take more than 35 minutes to transmit at 28.8 Kbps over a modest wide area network.
Compression makes bandwidth a manageable problem with, however.
Studies that once took two hours to transmit without compression are now sent in two to four minutes using 56 Kbps modems, an improvement embraced by carrier captains notoriously stingy about sharing bandwidth. Another problem the Navy faced was equipment incompatibility.