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May 10, 1999

NASA scientists use UCSC's videoconferencing facilities to demonstrate telemedicine project

By Tim Stephens

UCSC's videoconferencing classroom (Applied Sciences 156) is usually used to provide live interactive instruction to students at remote locations--a concept known as distance learning. Last week these facilities were used to demonstrate another innovative concept: telemedicine.

Telemedicine offers the potential for doctors in remote rural locations to have immediate access to the expertise of specialists located thousands of miles away. NASA is interested in telemedicine as a way to provide medical care to astronauts on long-term missions in space.

Scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field are developing a "Virtual Collaborative Clinic" to connect major medical facilities to widely dispersed sites for interactive collaboration. In last week's demonstration, doctors at four locations, linked via a server at NASA Ames, simultaneously viewed and manipulated sophisticated medical images from real patients and consulted with each other regarding diagnoses and treatment options.

Doctors from Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital came to UCSC to take advantage of the campus's high-performance, high-speed networking capabilities. Similarly, doctors from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation connected to the network from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. A third group of doctors joined the network from Stanford University Medical Center. And the Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico, linked up via a satellite connection.

In the future, as the technology becomes more cost-effective, hospitals such as the Cleveland Clinic and Salinas Valley Memorial are likely to invest in the kind of networking infrastructure now available only at research centers such as UCSC and NASA Ames.


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