Julian Cook

DENTISTS' OPINIONS OF AN ONLINE ORTHODONTIC ADVICE SERVICE

An online teledentistry service was tested for eight months to determine whether it could help to reduce the high level of inappropriate orthodontic referrals to consultants and provide general dental practitioners (GDPs) with quick access to advice that would enable them to tackle a wider range of cases themselves. Six GDPs took part in the trial and were interviewed after it had been running for four months. The most important conclusions from the interviews were that the process of sending cases was quite straightforward, that teledentistry was a good way of getting advice and that it was popular with both patients and their parents. The GDPs enjoyed the experience and felt that there had been significant benefits, especially in educational terms.

Online orthodontic advice : a protocol for a pilot teledentistry system

A prototype teledentistry service was established that incorporated a PC-based expert system designed to assist in orthodontic cases. It guided the general dental practitioner (GDP) through the assessment of a patients malocclusion and helped ensure that all relevant clinical observations were made and details recorded. The resulting data file, containing radiographic images and clinical data, was then transferred via the Internet to a dental specialist. The specialists recommendations were returned by the same route or, where appropriate, a realtime videoconference was conducted. During an eight-month trial, six GDPs referred 158 cases through the teledentistry system; another 24 cases were referred directly to a local consultant. The protocol used during the trial worked satisfactorily. The GDPs found that it was straightforward and covered all aspects of the cases they submitted.

The Effect of Resolution, Compression, Colour Depth and Display Modality on the Accuracy of Accident and Emergency Telemedicine

There are no current recommendations regarding the minimum technical specification for realtime telemedicine consultation in accident and emergency (A&E) practice. We assessed the effect of image resolution, compression, colour depth and display modality on perceived image quality and telediagnosis. Test sets of digitized radiographs and clinical images were subjected to a series of standardized manipulations and the resulting output files were evaluated by an expert panel using image scoring and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. For telemedicine in A&E work, the minimum technical specification should be regarded as images containing at least 250,000 pixels, compressed at up to JPEG 50 (or GIF for colour images) and displayed on a high-resolution computer monitor. These specifications resulted in average file sizes of 17 kByte for digital images and 9 kByte for radiographs.

Information Technology for postgraduate education: survey of facilities and skills in the South West Deanery

Objective To determine the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure available to, and IT skills of, obstetric specialiast registrars across the South West Denery.