The challenge
Interoperability is an important requirement for medical devices. To make one of its medical devices network-capable, a medical device manufacturer was looking for an external engineering specialist with medical and DICOM expertise who could take the load off its in-house development team and run the entire project.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the international standard for transmitting, processing, displaying and storing medical imaging information; it also covers the syntax and semantics of commands and messages.
The solution
NewTec took on the entire project, from requirements engineering through software development to testing. The NewTec specialists implemented the internal Bluetooth interface between the control terminal and a further system device, as well as the Ethernet interfaces for connecting to the hospital network. On top of that, various DICOM-compliant software functions were programmed, for example to automatically retrieve the current list of patients to be examined from the DICOM RIS hospital server, complete with patient data and examination orders.
After the examination, the course of events and the results can be assigned to the patient in the hospital picture archiving and communication system (DICOM PACS server) using DICOM Secondary Capture Image and DICOM tags. The GUI, also newly developed by NewTec on a QT basis, presents all the key information at a glance.
To achieve the highest possible level of security, different attack scenarios across the Bluetooth and Ethernet interfaces were played through and potential countermeasures developed. Various security mechanisms also keep patient data safe.
