The availability of remote access to supercomputing via high-speed portable connections will significantly impact existing medical services. Furthermore, the successful demonstration of this distributed remote treatment planning experiment via the ACTS-HDR gigabit satellite network is expected to stimulate new medical services as well as delivery mechanisms.
Medical services are almost always demand driven.
This project demonstrates not only the feasibility but also the necessity for such an integrated delivery of medical services. The demonstration application of radiation treatment planning turns out to be an appropriate test bed to illustrate the integrated use of the technologies, together with the added value from the human-machine cooperative service delivery. No one can argue that this ability to bridge the barriers of distance and time, with respect to these highly developed medical services, is anything less than futuristic.