iPath is a collaborative platform for exchange of medical
knowledge, distance consultations, group discussions and distance
teaching in medicine. Any medical professional who is interested in
participating is welcome and you can register yourself a user
account.Pathology Tele-Diagnosis support, users training and some
contibution to research, with focus in developing regions.
Benefits:
Benefit for patients in Developing Countries:
fast expert consultation and treatment
assistance for the resident doctor
easy and user-friendly handling
low costs for hospitals, the software is open source
low running costs for online-administration
online presentations of cases
Benefit for Physicians medical Staff and Students:
A local care provider in remote areas encounter a difficult
problems about a pathology case and prepare a question.
The question is shared trough Internet asking for second
opinions.
An international community of experts try to provide
advices.
The case is discussed in several steps, until an agreement
about a conclusion.
At the same time sharing medical knowhow is factor of training,
helping the beginners to become able to solve similar situation in the
future.
The project has been created as the thesis of Kurt Brauchli
at the University of Basel in 2002-2006.
Requirements:
Internet access.
A computer with a standard browser.
Registration on an iPath server:
New users are invited to work trough Internet to the server
located in Switzerland. Go to the Registration.
As an option at a later stage, intensive users organizations
could
install and manage their own server. Requirements are here some
time from their own informatics staff, a dedicated computer and a
relatively fast Internet access supporting the traffic of their users
group.
Participation in the community:
Medical issues:
Both beginners and experts are invited to share their
medical experience, particularly in Pathology. You can join an existing
group as histology, cytology, ... and/or create a new group. See the Test Group.
Organization and technical issues:
The project is supported by a non profit "working group" in
the scope of
the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth, http://www.isfteh.org/ and
particularly the "Collaborative
Care Team in Open Source", intended to develop a broader range of
services.
The participatiçon is free of any charges for
anybody. However sponsors involved in eHealth developments goals
are very welcome in
order to cover maintenance costs and assistance to new users in low
resources countries.
The software with documented source code is available in
the public
domain under the GPL licence.
It can be freely downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ipath/
, "as it is" with disclaim of liabilities.
Partners having informatics knowhow are free to use this
software, to distribute any number of copies and to make
extensions. However they are required to propose their software
improvements also as "open source".
If pathology applications:
Knowhow to make
histology and cytology slides.
A microscope with
a
camera
Contacts:
Questions and suggestions are very welcome in order to improve
the
functionallity of this web site, particularly about requirements and
ideas which could potentially be shared with other users. monika.hubler@basysdata.ch
.