А. Блажис, В. Дюк
Научно-технический центр биоинформатики и телемедицины "Фрактал", СПИИРАН
v_duke@spiiras.nw.ru

Preface

Today medical specialists are consolidated with the help of modern technical means in a unified virtual system – world-wide distributed medical intellect, the access to which can be received practically by everybody. Achievements of medicine, telecommunications and the information technologies forming this virtual system are a subject of a new trend – telemedicine.

The purpose of telemedicine is the maximum approach of medical services to a human being. With the help of telemedicine the services of the highly skilled physicians become accessible both inhabitants of the large cities and distant rural areas, seamen in the open sea, polar explorers on an ice floe, geologists in a taiga etc. It is specially actual in Russia with its huge territory, low density of the population in hard-to-reach regions and absence of a medical institution’s network there.

Telemedicine gains the special value in emergency situations, bound with natural disasters and calamities caused by people’s intrusion into the laws of nature. The operative skilled consultations in a distance help physicians located in a disaster’s zone to save human lives. In it’s turn, information receiving from a place of catastrophe gives a chance to form an objective estimate of the situation and take appropriate action.

The important supplement of telemedical technologies is the remote training. Being for hundreds and thousands kilometers from their “virtual” instructors, medical students can attend lectures or observe an operation spent by the most authoritative specialists. Telemedicine eliminates informational isolation of the doctors from rural and suburban hospitals, and creates for them qualitatively new capabilities for dialogue with the colleagues from large medical centers.

At the present time, it is known a great number of publications about telemedicine. As a rule, they are dedicated to separate aspects - videoconferences, medical data bases, delayed teleconsultations, technical security of telemedicine, intellectual telemonitoring and so on. The authors of this book tried to accumulate theoretical and practical information and give integrated insight of telemedicine in a simple form.