Supervisor

ii Teleradiology involves transmitting high-resolution medical images from one remote site to another and displaying the images effectively so that radiologists can perform the proper diagnosis. Recent advances in medicine combined with those in technology have resulted in a vast array of medical imaging techniques, but due to the characteristics of these images, there are challenges to overcome in order to transmit these images efficiently. We describe in this thesis a prototype system that implements three image retrieval algorithms (Full-resolution, Scaled, and Pre-compressed) for retrieving magnetic resonance (MR) images that are stored on a web server. The MR images are displayed on a computer monitor instead of a traditional light screen. Our prototype system consists of a Java-based Image Viewer, and a web server extension component called, Image Servlet. The latter is responsible for transmitting the MR images to the Image Viewer. This thesis also investigates the feasibility of achieving real-time performance in retrieving and viewing MR images over the Internet usin