Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide an opportunity to meet the growing needs of rural areas. Many of the key features of ICT can be used to provide information and the requirements of people in rural areas. The digital divide considered is an important problem that countries face and it is much more complex than simply building out telecommunication networks and infrastructure. The divide is the result of a wide range of social factors, including but not limited to economy factors, education, literacy. Telecommunication infrastructure alone will not guarantee that users will be able to access and take advantage of services on the network. The paper begins with an introduction to the digital divide, and thus to highlight several successful initiatives provided by educational institutions and governmental organizations in Libya in the adoption of ICT. Finally, the paper provides some of the solutions proposed to reduce this divide.

The use of computers for handling image data in the healthcare is growing The amount of data produced by modem image generating techniques, such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance (MR), is vast. The amount of data might be a problem from a storage point of view or when the data is sent over a network. To overcome these problems data compression techniques adapted to these applications are needed Many classes of images contain some spatial regions which are more important than other regions. Compression methods which are capable of achieving higher reconstruction quality of important parts of the image have been implemented For medical images, only a small portion of the image might be diagnostically useful but the cost of wrong interpretation is high. Algorithms which deliver lossless compression within the regions of interest (ROJ), and lossy compression elsewhere in the image, might be the key to providing efficient and accurate image coding to the medical community. In this thesis both of compression techniques (lossy and lossless) of medical images using the JPEG algorithm (DCT), will be discussed.