"As clinicians, I don't think we appreciate the potential of open-source collaboration, in part because we are entrenched in red tape and regulation," Balkman said. "An entire medical data infrastructure could be built from living rooms around the world using cloud computing."
Balkman worked with software developer and co-author Yves Martelli in Spain to create Vendor-Neutral Open Source (VeNOS), an approach that combines a zero-footprint HTML5/JavaScript DICOM viewer with a back-end cloud repository of medical images.
"This work shows how a cloud repository of medical images can be shared using entirely zero-footprint Web technology," he said. "Such an architecture implies a vendor-neutral plug-and-play environment, where users can switch between cloud repositories and Web-based image viewers seamlessly."
