268 research outputs found
A feasibility study for the provision of electronic healthcare tools and services in areas of Greece, Cyprus and Italy
No full textBackground:
Through this paper, we present the initial steps for the creation of an integrated platform for the provision of a series of eHealth tools and services to both citizens and travelers in isolated areas of thesoutheast Mediterranean, and on board ships travelling across it. The platform was created through an INTERREG IIIB ARCHIMED project called INTERMED.
Methods:
The support of primary healthcare, home care and the continuous education of physicians are the three major issues that the proposed platform is trying to facilitate. The proposed system is based on state-of-the-art telemedicine systems and is able to provide the following healthcare services: i) Telecollaboration and teleconsultation services between remotely located healthcare providers, ii) telemedicine services in emergencies, iii) home telecare services for "at risk" citizens such as the elderly and patients with chronic diseases, and iv) eLearning services for the continuous training through seminars of both healthcare personnel (physicians, nurses etc) and persons supporting "at risk" citizens.
These systems support data transmission over simple phone lines, internet connections, integrated services digital network/digital subscriber lines, satellite links, mobile networks (GPRS/3G), and wireless local area networks. The data corresponds, among others, to voice, vital biosignals, still medical images, video, and data used by eLearning applications. The proposed platform comprises several systems, each supporting different services. These were integrated using a common data storage and exchange scheme in order to achieve system interoperability in terms of software, language and national characteristics.
Results:
The platform has been installed and evaluated in different rural and urban sites in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. The evaluation was mainly related to technical issues and user satisfaction. The selected sites are, among others, rural health centers, ambulances, homes of "at-risk" citizens, and a ferry.
Conclusions:
The results proved the functionality and utilization of the platform in various rural places in Greece, Cyprus and Italy. However, further actions are needed to enable the local healthcare systems and the different population groups to be familiarized with, and use in their everyday lives, mature technological solutions for the provision of healthcare services
Emergency TeleOrthoPaedics m-health system for wireless communication links
No full textFor the first time, a complete wireless and mobile emergency TeleOrthoPaedics system with field trials and expert opinion is presented. The system enables doctors in a remote area to obtain a second opinion from doctors in the hospital using secured wireless telecommunication networks. Doctors can exchange securely medical images and video as well as other important data, and thus perform remote consultations, fast and accurately using a user friendly interface, via a reliable and secure telemedicine system of low cost. The quality of the transmitted compressed (JPEG2000) images was measured using different metrics and doctors opinions. The results have shown that all metrics were within acceptable limits. The performance of the system was evaluated successfully under different wireless communication links based on real data
m-Health e-Emergency Systems: Current Status and Future Directions
No full textAbstract- Rapid advances in wireless communications and networking technologies, linked with advances in computing and medical technologies facilitate the development and offering of emerging mobile systems and services in the healthcare sector. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status and challenges of mobile health systems (m-health) in emergency healthcare systems and services (eemergency). The paper covers a review of recent e-emergency systems, including the wireless technologies used, as well as the data transmitted (electronic patient record, biosignals, medical images and video, subject video, and other). Furthermore, emerging wireless video systems for reliable communications in these applications are presented. We anticipate that m-health e-emergency systems will significantly affect the delivery of healthcare; however, their exploitation in daily practice still remains to be achieved
M-Health Medical Video Communication Systems An Overview of Design Approaches and Recent Advances
No full textThe emergence of the new, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, combined with wide deployment of 4G wireless networks, will provide significant support toward the adoption of mobile-health (m-health) medical video communication systems in standard clinical practice. For the first time since the emergence of m-health systems and services, medical video communication systems can be deployed that can rival the standards of in-hospital examinations. In this paper, we provide a thorough overview of today's advancements in the field, discuss existing approaches, and highlight the future trends and objectives
M-Health: Emerging Mobile Health System
No full textM-health: Emerging Mobile Health Systems presents recent advances in this area and explores future trends in the applications of current and emerging wireless communication and network technologies for healthcare delivery and new wireless telemedical services. This work also evaluates the impact of the synergies between the 2.5G and 3G systems and beyond for healthcare applications and explores the augmentation of these technologies for the next generation of m-health services. M-health is commonly defined as the ‘emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare systems’. M-health represents a new framework of research, blending innovative mobile communications, network technologies, and medical sensor and ubiquitous computing devices with medical and biological sciences for enhanced healthcare delivery mechanisms and services
M-mode State Based Identification in Ultrasound Video of the Atherosclerotic Carotid Plaque
No full textMonitoring the wall and plaque changes in the carotid artery (CA) can provide useful information for the assessment of the atherosclerotic disease. Using a motion mode (M-mode) image, detailed information may be obtained about wall and lumen dimensions, systolic and diastolic artery diameter and distension, wall and plaque motion and thickness, and also their corresponding states (timings). The wall thickness and the diameter of the CA change during the cardiac cycle are an indicator of regional contraction and therefore an indication of a disease. The objective of this work was to investigate how M-mode state based modeling of the CA can be derived from a B-mode ultrasound video. Briefly, 10 longitudinal CA ultrasound videos acquired from symptomatic subjects at risk of atherosclerosis were broken into frames and their M-mode images were generated. These were then despeckled and the atherosclerotic carotid plaque was segmented from each video, in order to extract the states of the video. By identifying the states of the CA, we can distinguish between normal and abnormal plaque motion. It was shown in this work, that M-mode state based modeling derived from B-mode videos can be used successfully to derive the carotid states and assess the corresponding wall changes. However, further work in a larger number of videos is needed for validating the proposed method and to differentiate between normal and abnormal state based plaque motion analysis
A review of m-Health e-Emergency Systems: Current Status and Future Directions
No full textRapid advances in wireless communications and networking technologies, linked with advances in computing and medical technologies, facilitate the development and offering of emerging mobile systems and services in the healthcare sector. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status and challenges of mobile health systems (m-health) in emergency healthcare systems and services (e-emergency). The paper covers a review of recent e-emergency systems, including the wireless technologies used, as well as the data transmitted (electronic patient record, bio-signals, medical images and video, subject video, and other). Furthermore, emerging wireless video systems for reliable communications in these applications are presented. We anticipate that m-health e-emergency systems will significantly affect the delivery of healthcare; however, their exploitation in daily practice still remains to be achieve
An M-Health monitoring system for children with suspected arrhythmias
No full textAdvances in wireless communications and networking technologies as well as computer and medical technologies, enable the development of small size, power efficient and more reliable medical multi-parameter recording systems, which can be used for continuous monitoring of patients. Through this paper we present the basic architecture and initial development steps of an m-Health monitoring system that will be used in order to monitor children with suspected cardiac arrhythmias. The proposed system will be based on sensor networks, in order to monitor a subject while being in a predefined area like his/her house; while a module based on PDAs and wearable ECG recorders will be used in order to extent the coverage outside the patient's house. The system will be based on a variable sampling rate to conserve power for the possible arrhythmia episode. The system design has been completed, the hardware specifications have been decided and currently the system is going through the development phase
Completely automated multi-resolution edge snapper (CAMES) - A new technique for an accurate carotid ultrasound IMT measurement and its validation on a multi-institutional database
No full textTowards Diagnostically Robust Medical Ultrasound Video Streaming using H.264
No full textM-Health systems and services have seen significant growth over the past decade. Increasingly available bitrate through new wireless technologies linkes with compression advances provided by current state-of-the-art H.264 advanced video coding standard, have brought rapid growth to the development of mobile health (m-Health) healthcare systems and services. Advances in nanotechnologies, compact biosensors, wearable devices and clothing, pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems have broadened the applicability areas of such systems and services. A recent overview of the current status, hoghlighting future directions, while also covering incorporated wireless transmission technologies, can be found in (Kyriacou et al., 2007; Istepanian et al., 2006).
Despite this momentum towards m-Health systems and especially e-Emergency systems, wireless channels remain error prone, while the absence of objective quality metrics (Wang & Bovik, 2009) limits the ability of providing medical video of adequate diagnostic quality at a required bitrate. Recently, new image and video quality metrics have been proposed, for evaluating the original and transmitted (or despeckled) (Loizou & Pattichis, 2008) video over a communication path, but these have not yet been applied to wireless transmission. The development of effective medical video streaming systems requires the implementation of error-resilient methods that are also diagnostically relevant. Although a plethora of studies has been published in video transmission of medical ultrasound video. In (Doukas & Maglogiannis, 2008), scalable coding is used for adaptive transmission of medical images and video snapshots over simulated wireless networks, while in (Tsapatsoulis et al., 2007), a saliency-based visual attention ROI for low bit-rate medical video transmission is proposed. Mathematically lossless (M-lossless) coding of the ROI after video denoising using motion compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) is practiced in (Rao & Jayant, 2005). A new rate control algorithm which takes into account a new motion complexity measure together with perceptual bit allocation is proposed in (Hongtao et al., 2005).
Here, we investigate different encoding schemes and packet loss rates in video transmission and provide recommendations regarding efficiency and the trade-off between bitrate and diagnostic quality. We propose the use of different frame type ordering schemes and provide methods for quantifying video quality for different packet loss rates. We also provide lower bounds for acceptable video quality and discuss how these bounds can be achieved by different frame type encoding schemes. A preliminary study appears in (Panayides et al., 2008).
Then, we are interested in exploiting new error resilience techniques and how they relate to diagnostic error resilient encoding. Loss tolerance is subject to the amount of clinical data recovered and whether this amount is suitable for providing acceptable diagnosis. Failure to do so may result in iprecise diagnosis. Consequently, the effort is directed towards maximizing error protection and recovery while at the same time conforming to channel limitations (bandwidth) and (varying) conditions (introducing delay, jitter, packet loss, and data corruption). We propose the development of effective wireless video transmission systems by extending the current state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard to provide for video encoding that is driven by its intended diagnostic use.
Medical experts evaluating carotid ultrasound video are mainly interested in identifying possible stenosis of the carotid artery. Having diagnosed a stenosis, they aim at extracting atherosclerotic plaque (causing the stenosis) features, tracking of which in time can aid in the prediction of the severity of this abnormality. Intima media thickness (IMT) of the near and far wall also aid in this direction. The remaining regions of the video carry little, yet some diagnostic significance.
Bearing in mind the aforementioned, segmentation algorithms identifying these region(s) of diagnostic interest (ROIs) were developed by our group. The key concept is that once diagnostic ROIs have been defined, the remaining part of the part of the video can be effectively compressed without significantly altering diagnosis. We investigate the use of a spatially-varying encoding scheme, where quantization levels are spatially varying as a function of the diagnostic significance of the video. To implement this approach, we use flexible macroblock ordering (FMO). Having derived the diagnostic ROIs of carotid ultrasound medical video, we use them as input for FMO type 2 slice encoding. We extend the FMO concept by enabling variable quality slice encoding (i.e. different quantizantion parameter for each ROI), tightly couple by each region's diagnostic importance, targeting high diagnostic quality at a reduced bitrate. Subjective (clinical evaluation) as well as objective (PSNR) quality assessment shows considerable bitrate reductions while at the same not compromising diagnostic quality.
The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the fundamental concepts of video streaming architecture and protocols. Section 3 briefly highlights H.264, describes frame types and encoding modes, as well as Flecible Macrblock Ordering. Section 4 illustrates the methodology while section 5 presents an analysis of the conducted experiments. Finally Section 6 provides some concluding remarks
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