Hospitals and healthcare centers want to expand their current network bandwidth and capacity to accommodate new applications without making significant investments in overhauling existing wiring plants. However, most hospitals and medical buildings are constrained by the low bandwidth-distance performance of their copper wiring. A legacy from an earlier technology, copper wiring has hindered the creation of versatile, high-bandwidth medical networks capable of managing, storing, archiving, and communicating multimedia information. To solve this problem, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes a unique digital data link technology that will dramatically increase the bandwidth-distance performance of copper-based data links. This technology will utilize the vast copper wiring infrastructure in existing medical networks for high- capacity multimedia information transmission among disk/archive systems, digital image acquisition/analysis stations, and medical users. Phase I will focus on designing and prototyping a medical data link, then testing and evaluating it within a clinical environment. Phase II will develop a hard- wired electronic chip set and a device/network integration technique for high-performance medical data network applications. We also anticipate that the successful development of the proposed approach will create a quantum leap in data rates and functionality of copper-based data link media.
Because of their increased overall data bandwidth and network connectivity, the proposed network modules will be applicable to many medical networks (such as health care delivery systems, health information networks, and electronic patient records) and to many other scientific, environmental, and commercial organizations. Moreover, the resulting products will solve similar problems in future local area networks and multimedia networks.
