IBM has a new partnership with Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston on a research project to create an online radiology theater, enabling medical experts to simultaneously discuss and review patients' medical test data through a Web browser.

The company created a secure website that allows select medical experts at Brigham and Women's Hospital to "make rounds" on a patient, regardless of the doctors' location. Medical imaging data from CT scans, MRIs, EKGs and other tests can be posted on the site and for team analysis. Medical experts can converse through live streaming audio/video using a standard Web connection. Furthermore, they have the ability to "whiteboard" over the Web page, as well as input information to the patient's record.

The virtual theater enables teams of experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, bringing together personal data, experts and clinical data in one physical, visual arena.
The Radiology Theatre website is hosted by an IBM secure software server, which provides the conference management, application synchronization and subscription to push services. IBM built the Radiology Theatre using the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine and IBM's Blue Spruce prototype code. The server currently runs on Linux or the MacOS X operating systems. The browser can be Safari or Internet Explorer. The application uses the following open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, XMPP and H.264.

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