Singular Health Group Ltd (ASX: SHG) has released the first publicly available version of its Medical File Transfer Protocol (MFTP), as part of the 3Dicom v2.5.0 software release.
MFTP provides radiologists, medical practitioners and patients with the ability to retrieve a raw DICOM file from existing servers and securely share the actual DICOM file between different devices and entities for better information flows.
With more than 80% of patients expressing an interest in viewing their own medical scans, and current patient portals and radiological reports only displaying key images or 2D views, MFTP will deliver 3D patient-specific visualisation direct to patient’s personal computers.
The transfer of patient data is highly complex, and the company has made several technical breakthroughs both in file compression and creating scalable, immutable audit trails for enterprise and patient-to-patient transfers.
File compression is key to enabling MFTP as the initial medical image files can be a few hundred MBs and larger file sizes directly relates to higher costs for transfer and storage, and the need for high-speed, high-bandwidth internet which limits global deployment.
Through numerous methods, Singular Health’s team has been able to compress raw DICOM files by up to 85% whilst still retaining the original quality and metadata. This allows for MFTP to be used with lower speed networks and enables low-cost storage. The compression happens on the device itself prior to sharing the file which reduces time to upload/download.
Relating to file storage, Singular Health is utilising private cloud infrastructure with dedicated in-country data centres where possible to ensure in-country storage and best-practice for global file transfer when sending scans between countries through encryption and multi- factor authentication.
Recording who is sharing and receiving medical files, and why the file has been shared is essential to ensuring patient confidentiality and the legal usage of medical imaging. MFTP uses private blockchain infrastructure to record a distributed, immutable ledger of all ‘transactions’ whilst preserving the anonymity of users. This allows for a distributed ledger that can used for audits of certain users whilst preserving the anonymity of all others.
Thomas Morrell, Singular Health’s Chief Technology Officer, said MFTP is critical to Scan to Surgery, acting as the backbone infrastructure upon which all the scans, design files and surgical notes for a patient-specific surgical approach are shared and tracked along the vertically integrated Scan to SurgeryTM process.
The ability to quickly and securely transfer the actual DICOM and design files from practitioner-to-practitioner and practitioner-to-patient provides numerous future opportunities for telehealth, collaborative review and design and a better involvement of all stakeholders in a patient’s journey,” Mr Morrell said.
“I’m very proud of our dedicated developers to deliver such a complex system and integrate it into our existing software.”