The USS George Washington and NNMC systems are part of the Multimedia Integrated Distributed Network, a Defense Department Health Affairs system. The teleradiology systems on the USS George Washington are IBM Intellistation M Pros. Meta Solutions Inc. of Linthicum, Md., supplied the products through a contract the General Services Administration negotiated for the Navy. The aircraft carrier also has a 200-MHz Pentium server with a 20G hard drive and a Level 5 RAID storage unit, Bailey said. Calif. Phosphor over film For the X-ray technology, the service uses computerized radiography units that directly capture digital images via reusable phosphor plates rather than film, Bailey said.
Film is expensive and hard to develop afloat.
It also creates hazardous waste. The Navy's surgeon general, Vice Adm. Harold Koenig, has promoted telemedicine because it moves information and not patients, Bailey said. It's a challenge to do it afloat in the Navy and to retrain people to do it. For the radiology system, the Navy uses RadWorks, a software from Applicare Medical Imaging B.V., a Dutch company. RadWorks runs under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. and can flip, invert, magnify and rotate images.