Tele-ultrasound System Research Articles

The design and implementation of an off-the-shelf, standards-based tele-ultrasound system.

We developed an off-the-shelf system to transfer DICOM-compliant ultrasound images from a small rural hospital in northern Alberta to an urban radiology clinic in Calgary. The transfer time was less than 30 s per image. The radiologist could then review the case and release the patient. The radiologist could also switch to realtime videoconferencing mode and direct the rural ultrasound technician to obtain additional images of the patient.

Design and implementation of a novel compression method in a tele-ultrasound system.

This paper represents a novel compression method for ultrasound images in a tele-ultrasound system. The encoder chooses the ultrasound scan line signals as the object to be compressed and transmitted other than the standard video images in conventional methods. Furthermore, nonuniform discrete wavelet transform is proposed considering the different resolutions in axial and lateral directions of ultrasound images. Experimental results show that the new method provides better compression performance than conventional methods in terms of a peak signal-to-noise ratio and processing time.