Kazunobu Yamauchi

International standard-based video-conferencing systems are widely used in telemedicine activities worldwide. Through our experiences with these systems, it is apparent that the image quality is high enough to conduct educational and conferential sessions. However, because the terminals are intended for common use, we evaluated their qualities. After having an international standard system evaluated by a general practitioner using medical images, we prepared non-medical graphic images to examine the characteristics of the video-conferencing equipment. ROC (Receiver Operation Characteristic) analysis was employed for the evaluation. We concluded that the international standard video-conferencing systems are of sufficient quality for medical presentations, and that their interactivity and the use of proper software will aid the understanding of images in specific medical areas.

The statistical method in a comparative study in which the standard treatment is theoretically or practically superior to the others has been investigated for a matched-pairs design. We derived this statistical method from one based on the maximum likelihood and score methods. Here we have shown that the score test statistic is algebraically the same as the statistic from the maximum likelihood method. As an example of our method's applications, we have considered a study on the detection of nodules on chest X-ray images displayed on a CRT with low luminance.