Mukherjee, Jayanta, Majumdar, A.K., Banerjee, A., Acharya, B.,
Nayak, A. and Reddy, U.V., Telemedicine for Leprosy (2001),
IETE Technical Review, Vol. 18, no. 4, pp.243-252.  Abstract. 
Telemedicine is referred to the diagnosis and treatment of patients from a remote place, where the patient is not physically present. Usually, in a telemedicine system, two physicians at two ends consult with each other with the patient data. At the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur we have developed a prototype telemedicine system for the treatment of tropical diseases. Keeping in view of available infrastructure in our country, we have designed the system in such a way, so that it can function even at a very low bit rate data communication channel (telephone line). Our domain of discourse is chronic tropical diseases which are endemic in the eastern India. To start with, we have selected leprosy and dermatological disorders. In the proposed system, we have adopted a store and forward approach. The bulk of the patient information such as patient's history, signs and symptoms, old prescriptions, diagnostic test reports and images etc. are transferred before doctors at two ends start discussion about the patient. The physicians at the referral end could browse through the patient-data and advise accordingly. During on-line conferencing, the physicians at the two ends could converse with each other and discuss with respect to a test report and image by annotations, diagrams, texts etc. The system has also the back-end database support for storage and retrieval of patients' data. Presently a prototype system has been developed and installed at the School of Tropical Medicine (STM), Calcutta for in-house testing and training of the doctors. In this paper we briefly present different features of this system with respect to the treatment and diagnosis of leprosy. A few experimental sessions were carried out between Calcutta and Kharagpur. Based on these experimentations, we have summarized our observations regarding the performance of the system at the end.