India, a developing country has huge pressure on its health systems for meeting the health needs of our increasing population. There is huge unmet demand for provision of medical services in rural areas where most of our country's population lives. In today's era of modern medicine, a lot of emphasis is laid on radiological diagnostics for patient treatment planning. Higher centers where experts in these fields are present or located are mostly confined to urban India. Then there are centers of excellence in these fields which are further limited to very few and countable on fingers. This disparity directly affects the quality of radiological teaching and understanding of the subject between students of different medical and dental colleges. Organizations with expertise in different areas viz. National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Mumbai and CSIR-Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, Chandigarh joined in for effective development, implementation and roll-out of an application which could bring a shift in the way in which radiological diagnosis and teaching is carried out.
The model project "Network Enabled Medical Diagnosis and Education in Skeletal Imaging using X-Rays" funded by the National Knowledge Network (NKN), was undertaken as a Proof of Concept to provide a network based system for radiological and orthodontic diagnosis using X-Rays. The area of study being complicated required expertise in varied domains such as but not limited to Orthodontics, Orthopedics, Radiology, Computational Methods, CAD/ Rapid Prototyping, Image Processing & Pattern Recognition. Project was planned in two phases; first one being to develop an application which could enable visualization and processing of radiological data over a collaborative platform and second to effectively roll out and enhance the application as per the end user needs.
The project has been envisaged and is in progress keeping in view two goals. First one is to connect Primary Health Centres (PHC's) with expert radiologists/ doctors & dentists at Medical/ Dental colleges and Hospitals using suitable Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) tools and channel for real time radiological data transmission. This platform would enable physicians at remote level PHC's to have real time radiological diagnosis for their patients. Further, experts could use this platform to collaborate. The high-bandwidth and low-latency capability of the NKN would provide an ideal platform for data transmission as radiological data is huge in size and thus poses problems for utilization in real time because of latency in data transmission. This would prove to be of extreme value for both patients and primary level physicians in rural areas for radiological consultation with experts sitting at tertiary centres in real time and thus provide better diagnosis and treatment.
CollabDDS (Collaborative digital diagnosis system), an initiative of CollabCAD Group, NIC; Department of Radio Diagnosis, AIIMS ; Department of Orthodontics, CDER, AIIMS ; OrthoCAD Group, Mechanical Engineering, IITB, Mumbai and Central Scientific Instruments Organisation (CSIR), Chandigarh, is an extension of CollabCAD to Biomedical Applications and an outcome of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) Model Project "Network Enabled Medical Diagnosis and Education in Skeletal Imaging using X-Rays". It has been in place since Oct' 2014.
CollabDDS provides Real time collaborative environment to visualize medical (Skeletal) and dental images (digitized X-Ray images or DICOM data) for radiological diagnosis and treatment planning. It can also function as a Repository of teaching cases for Learning, Tools to Annotate and Measure, Image Manipulation Tools.
The main objectives of CollabDDS are:
CollabDDS application has following features:
CollabDDS cover following Domains
CORS (CollabDDS Online Radiological Services), is a web interface implemented, among different health communities for resolution of radiological and dental issues. It has following features: