Abstract

Advances in modern healthcare have been enabled to a large extent by the application of diagnostic imaging, introduced just over a century ago. In the past several decades, the invention of new forms of electronic imaging have grown to be indispensable for current medical practice. However, new forces are now occurring that portend significant different directions for the future of electronics in medical imaging. Historically, the application of electronics to medical imaging has been a technology push, with research discovering new forms of information to detect, and products introduced and accepted by the marketplace with little question of efficacy or cost benefit. Because of society's reaction to the overall escalating cost of healthcare, there is now a reluctance to accept new electronic products without economic and clinical justification. Moreover, to date electronics has been primarily applied to the front of the “imaging chain," in new forms of image acquisition. With a wealth of imagery already in hand, market pull is beginning to direct the application of electronics to solve problems in other parts of the imaging chain, e.g., transmission, storage, display, image management. We review the present state of electronic medical imaging and comment on future trends powered by the aforementioned forces.

© 1996 Optical Society of America