Q+A CENTER

"If a doctor only needs to see a knee cap that is in the lower right side of the X-ray, why should he decompress the whole image?" Berlin asks. "By using intelligent decompression algorithms, the doctor can decode a 200x200 pixel area and forget the rest of it."

While bandwidth is slowly increasing, it is not keeping up with the demand, adds Benini. "MRI and CT scan technology is advancing so rapidly that the slice frequency is becoming higher and higher," he says. "It used to be that there were several millimeters between slices of a CT scan, and now it is under a millimeter. That is double or triple the number of slices that are coming out of these machines and quadrupling the amount of data that needs to be transmitted."

"The key is standards compliance," adds Benini. "With a standardized client and server communication protocol, you don't need the same technology on both sides of the link. This vastly expands the flexibility of the system owner, and makes the images much more sharable among external disparate systems."

OpenGL
The recently released OpenGL 2.0 will "rock the world," says 3DLabs' Rost. OpenGL is used for portable, interactive 2-D and 3-D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become a widely used and supported 2-D and 3-D graphics API. It features tools such as rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other visualization jobs. (For more information, click here.)

"It has changed the world for games, CAD, and other applications," he says. "There are tremendous interests for video, medical imaging, and other areas where proprietary algorithms were once necessary."