Cybron brings telemedicine to Malaysia

Cybron Technology has introduced to Malaysian radiologists imaging software that transmits scanned images over a variety of telecommunications networks. Cybron hopes to have the system in 10 hospitals by the end of this year.

Voyager software sends and retrieves images through standard phone lines or an ISDN link. It was developed by Australian company Compumedics. Cybron is the distributor for Voyager in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brunei. Cybron Technology is a division of Multimedia Super Corridor, an IT investment initiative sponsored by the Malaysian government.

Alex Kong of Cybron said Voyager enables clinicians to send x-rays and reports long distances almost instantly. Sending x-ray film and reports from a hospital in Ipoh to Kuala Lumpur, for example, is customarily done by courier. It usually takes a few days to send the film and receive an interpretation back from the distant radiologist, he said.

Voyager is based on an open architecture and runs on standard hardware and programming platforms, such as Windows, and may be developed for a Linux platform in the future. Kong said Cybron will in the future be able to store patient records on the software.

The Voyager package includes an image viewer, wavelet compression, scanning software, DICOM store-and-receive, 12-bit imaging, videoconferencing, and direct capture.

Voyager is already installed at sites in Australia, China, the U.S., and Hong Kong.