Medical quality of service for optimized ultrasound streaming in wireless robotic tele-ultrasonography system

Philip, Nada Y. (2008) Medical quality of service for optimized ultrasound streaming in wireless robotic tele-ultrasonography system. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .

Abstract

Mobile healthcare (m- health) is a new paradigm that brings together the evolution of emerging wireless communications and network technologies with the concept of 'connected healthcare' anytime and anywhere. There are two critical issues facing the successful deployment of m-health applications from the wireless communications perspectives. First, wireless connectivity issues and mobility requirements of real-time bandwidth demanding m-health applications. Second, the Quality of Service (QoS) issues from the healthcare perspective and their required levels to guarantee robust and clinically acceptable healthcare services. This thesis consider the concept of medical QoS (m-QoS) issues for typical bandwidth demanding m-health application (tele-ultrasound streaming) in 3G and 3.5G wireless environments. Specifically this thesis introduces a new concept of m-QoS that provide a sub-category of quality of services from the m-health perspective. A wireless robotic tele-ultrasonography system is adopted in this research as the m-health application. Accordingly the m-QoS metrics and its functional bounds for this m-health application are defined. To validate this concept a new optimal video streaming rate control policy is proposed based on the Q-Iearning approach to deliver the ultrasound images over 3G and 3.5G environments. To achieve these objectives an end-to-end architecture for streaming M-JPEG compressed ultrasound video over 3G and 3.5G communication network is developed. Through this a client-server test bed is developed to capture the ultrasound images and adaptively varying its frame rate and the quality and send to the other end. The new rate control algorithm was implemented via this test bed. This thesis shows the performance analysis of the proposed rate control algorithm in terms of achieving the defined m-QoS over 3G and 3.5G wireless connections. In collaboration with medical expert in ultrasonography field, subjective image analysis are also carried out to validate the quality of the processed images.

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