Technologies and Practices: Mobile Healthcare Based on Medical Image Cloud and Big Data (in China)

Modern information technologies such as mobile computing, cloud computing and big data have brought new possibilities for modern healthcare services. In developing countries such as China where the vast majority of healthcare has been delivered in hospitals, mobile healthcare is of great significance to provide easy and quality care for everyone in and out of hospitals. In response to China’s national strategy “Healthy China 2030”, a nationwide hierarchical medical system needs to be established in due course. Featuring ubiquitous access with quality guarantee and consistent user experience on different terminals anytime anywhere, mobile healthcare has been regarded as one of the most important means to support the grand mission of hierarchical medical system. In the process of implementing mobile healthcare, all types of medical data (e.g. patient information, medical records, medical images, health check data, etc.) are to be shared across hospitals boarders. From the computing perspective, mobile medical imaging is regarded as the most challenging issue as medical image processing is the most network and computation resource consuming. Based on systematic requirement analysis, this chapter presents an innovative mobile medical image cloud system. The system enables seamless integration of multiple types of medical data especially medical image data from different vendors globally, and forms the basis for Big Data analysis for smarter healthcare in the future. A real-world case study of cloud teleconsultation using medical image cloud and big data technologies is also presented to prove its technical feasibility and replicability in practice in China.