A Real-Time Medical Ultrasound Image Sequence Transmission System with Narrow Integrated Service Digital Network

Abstract

In this paper, a new telemedicine system which enables real-time telediagnosis using medical ultrasound (US) image sequences on a public digital network with a speed of up to 128 kbps, famed as narrow integrated service digital network (N-ISDN) is proposed. This system can be used to transmit two types of image sequences: one is the image sequence of an entire region in low time/space resolution and the other is a region of interests (ROI) in high time/space resolution. Therefore, a medical doctor at a diagnosis site can instruct the technician at the live acquisition site about the location and angle of the probe, using the entire region image sequences. When the appropriate slices are obtained, a medical doctor can diagnose the high-resolution image sequences of the ROI. We developed the prototype which compresses the US image sequences with discrete cosine transform (DCT) and examined the system on a user datagram protocol/Internet protocol (UDP/IP) communication channel. The experimental results show that the image sequences of an entire region, which holds 640 × 480 pixels, are transmitted with 5.0 frames per second less than 112.5 kbps, and that the ROI, which holds 90 × 90 pixels, are transmitted with 14.2 frames per second less than 81.9 kbps.