A Real-Time Telemedicine System Using a Medical Ultrasound Image Sequence on a Low Bit-Rate Network

A new telemedicine system that enables real-time telemedicine using a medical ultrasound image sequence on a digital network of up to 128 kbps is proposed. This system compresses an image sequence by our original joint photographic expert group (JPEG) compression library that adapts for real-time and point-to-point communication. Moreover, this system deals with three transmission modes to provide smooth telemedicine and two kinds of transmission images. The three transmission modes available include real-time teleconferencing between the remote expert at a diagnosis site and the doctor and a patient at a patient site, real-time remote instruction from the remote expert to obtain an appropriate medical ultrasound image sequence for the diagnosis and real-time transmission of the medical ultrasound image sequence for the remote expert to make the diagnosis. One transmission image contains an entire medical ultrasound image with a low frame rate, therefore the remote expert can diagnose a disease using this medical ultrasound image sequence that contains tissue and other information. The other image is of the region of interest (ROI) of a medical ultrasound image sequence for diagnosis. The ROI is specified by the remote expert at the diagnosis site to reduce the size of the medical ultrasound image. As a result, the proposed system transmits the ROI with a high frame rate. Through international telemedicine experiments using medical ultrasound image sequence consulting experts, we can state with sufficient certainty that the proposed system can provide the required performance to enable medical experts to perform real-time telemedicine on a digital network or over the Internet.