**4. Digital medical imaging in Laos**

Lao People's Democratic Republic (hereinafter referred to as Laos) is an Association of Southeast Asian Nations member country with a population of approximately 6.49 million (as of 2019) in a land area (approximately 240,000 km2 ) equivalent to Japan's mainland [11]. There are 429 dentists in Laos. Among these, 153 have dental clinics in Vientiane city, and 72 work in the UHS (as of 2019). Compared to neighboring countries, there are scarce medical personnel and resources, causing delay of home medical care system for the elderly population.

Currently, as life expectancy increases, the needs for dentistry for the elderly population have become apparent (i.e., oral tumors, and periodontal disease) in the world [12]. Diagnostic imaging is becoming essential in the field of dentistry from the viewpoint of medical safety.

The DPR and the CBCT images have been widely used for diagnosing diseases in the complex maxillofacial area and have become indispensable for safe and secure medical care in the dental field [13, 14]. However, in Laos, DPR and CBCT are expensive, so only one pair of DPR and CBT devices are installed at the University of Health Sciences (UHS), which is the only medical university in the country. Thus, there has been an unsolved problem in the effective utilizing of the digital medical imaging devices in community medicine in Laos.

The establishment of medical ICT system has been expected to solve these problems of sharing digital imaging data among medical institutes.

Recently, regional medical cooperation using medical ICT has been developed in Japan [15, 16], and medical imaging data have been provided and shared using a mobile tablet terminal application among medical institutions [17]. Therefore, we were inspired to take advantage of medical ICT to solve the inconvenient situation of the CBCT in Laos, as the joint research project between Nihon University and UHS (Duration 2011–2020).

The outline of the project is as follows.

• Purpose: Our project aims to provide DPR and CBCT images to dentists by constructing the medical ICT network using smartphones and tablet type terminals (data terminal equipment) from UHS in Vientiane city.

*Empirical Study on Medical Information and Communication Technology System in Dentistry… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101080*


From the perspective of sustainability in the application of dental diagnostic imaging in Laos, we decided to gradually start technology transfer to clinical dentists through joint research among researchers. Our project started from the stage of clinical research as the first phase to empirical research as the second phase, utilizing the medical ICT system.

In this joint research project, we first trained clinical researchers for digital image on maxillofacial radiology in Laos. In the next stage, we supported researchers to create an environment where they could train radiology professionals.
