Editor’s note: This guest post comes from Dr. Naoyuki Kitamura whose company, Medical Network Systems Inc, relies on the cloud to efficiently power a medical diagnosis system that helps look after the needs of communities in remote parts of Japan.

Japan faces a critical shortage of radiologists. Although major hospitals are well equipped to conduct scans, the scarcity of experts to read the images and give patients their diagnoses means that people—especially those living in rural areas—often have to wait a long time to receive their results. This can have tragic consequences for people with serious conditions.

To address this shortage and help people get accurate diagnoses faster, Medical Network Systems Inc started a remote diagnosis service in 2000. Rather than waiting for patients to come to hospitals, we began bringing the radiology equipment to them in buses. However, we were still short on radiologists who could read the scans, and wanted to find ways to give patients in remote areas access to these specialists.
[Image] Last year, our team started using Google Cloud Platform to power our remote-diagnosis systems. Patients used to be given a hard copy of their scan to take to a doctor or specialist. Moving the process to the cloud speeds everything up. Our technicians upload images and scans right from the bus and specialists can then log into the system from wherever they’re working, review the scans and diagnose the patient remotely.

Reading scans is a very specialized process. Radiologists must examine many images in a very particular sequence, and it’s important that there are no lags or that it’s slow. One of the benefits of using Google’s services is that they can handle massive volumes of information efficiently. Google App Engine processes the images and data in the right sequence and enables us to cross-reference patient inputs with existing radiographic and pathological information.


Instead of waiting a few days or a week for a diagnosis, which was the usual turnaround for our teleradiology service, patients can now get their results within a few hours. And it’s not just our patients benefiting from remote diagnosis; enabling our radiologists to work from anywhere has meant that many of our female specialists are able to stay in the workforce. They’re able to work from home and look after their kids at the same time. With so few radiologists in Japan, this flexibility helps us keep skilled technicians in the workforce.

We’re optimistic about the potential for cloud-based technology to enrich our understanding of pathological issues and believe it signals a new chapter for the healthcare industry by removing geographical barriers between patients and doctors.

Posted by Dr. Naoyuki Kitamura, CEO, Medical Network Systems Inc, Japan