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The Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University (BGSM) is installing clinical DICOM workstations and DICOM film digitizers for use in a telemedicine trial over the North Carolina ATM infrastructure. Acquiring equipment thought to be DICOM compliant, but which does not live up to expectations and possibly fails to interoperate with other DICOM equipment, is a concern. In cooperation with RSNA and the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology of the Washington University School of Medicine (MIR), BGSM made acceptance of the CEMAX workstations for the telemedicine trial contingent upon a satisfactory test with the MIR central test node (CTN). During the test, both engineers never left their hospitals during the tests drastically cutting travel and per diem costs and valuable time. The successful results exceeded expectations. Images were not only passed back and forth to the CTN by both the CEMAX clinical workstation and the quality assurance workstation, but images arriving from the CTN were entered into the CEMAX clinical database without operator intervention. It was expected that the images would transfer, but the placement into the database, although reasonable to expect, actually occurred. This live test from an independent test source exhibited the ease with which the CEMAX workstations handled the DICOM images in their systems. In the test, the CEMAX workstations were configured as an exporter of DICOM images at BGSM. The CTN was entered in the configuration of the CEMAX workstations as a source of DICOM images. The test was to ensure that plain film, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance images could be easily exchanged between workstations electronically. This paper describes the procedure for using the CTN to provide preliminary testing of DICOM equipment.
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