June 16, 1997

Telemedicine's promise: Hospital performs diagnosis over the Internet

By ANDREA McDANIELS
Associated Press Writer

BOSTON (AP) -- When a 7-year-old boy in Turkey broke his hip by merely falling on the school playground, his doctors were at a loss to explain what was wrong.

So using innovative software, doctors in Istanbul scanned his X-ray on a computer and sent the image via Internet to American specialists who diagnosed a tumor within minutes. The child arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital two days later to begin a complicated treatment almost unavailable in his homeland.

Officials said the boy would have faced a life of pain and deformity had doctors not caught the tumor in time Monday.

The swift process shows the promise telemedicine can bring to isolated patients who can't be examined by specialists, doctors at the hospital said, calling it the first real-time diagnosis performed over the Internet.

"For us it's very exciting," said Dr. Giles W.L. Boland, director of teleradiology at MGH. "To our knowledge, nobody's doing it anywhere, internally within a hospital, let alone internationally."

The Internet has been around for years, but the technology allowing doctors to transmit high-resolution images cheaply and quickly was not, Boland said.

For the past five years, the hospital relied on expensive equipment that could only send images to other hospitals outfitted with the exact same devices.

The new method uses software created by Autocytgroup Inc. of Watertown, Mass., and transmits through Netscape, an ordinary Internet server.

"Usually to send images across the Atlantic, you have to use satellite telephone lines, but over the Internet it's beano. There's no charge for transmission," Boland said. "It's the Holy Grail nowadays."

Boland said the transmission of patient information is protected by an access code, and that doctors won't offer an opinion unless they receive a complete high-quality image.

Hovering around their son's hospital bed Friday, Oguzcan Babaoglu's parents said they were grateful for the quick diagnosis.

"They scanned in the X-ray and in the same day they got an answer," marveled his father, Osman Babaoglu, a 42-year-old industrial engineer.

"We are very happy. Here is much more organized," said the mother, Rana, 40, an architect in Istanbul.

Turkey is the only country working with the new software since it was approved six months ago by the Food and Drug Administration, Boland said.

"The goal is to make this sufficiently affordable to that it would permit less affluent countries to use it for internal use and get opinions from outside the country," he said. "This is just the beginning."