Garawi, Salem A. (2006) Performance analysis of a mobile robotic tele-ultrasonography system over 2.5G/3G communication networks. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
The concept of merging the state of the art, mobile and wireless communication technologies and health care is the research subject of this thesis. The emerging concept represents the evolution of M-health systems from traditional desktop 'telemedicine' platforms to wireless and mobile configurations. Current developments in wireless communications integrated with developments in pervasive and ultrasound monitoring technologies will have a radical impact on future healthcare delivery systems. The work in this thesis formed part of developing an end-to-end mobile robotic tele-ultrasonography system called (OTELO), that brings together the evolution of merging wireless communications and network technologies with the concept of 'connected healthcare' anytime and anywhere. OTELO system allows an Expert to examine a distant patient by remotely and virtually controlling robotic ultrasound probe, that produces ultrasound images transmitted to the Expert side in a real-time environment. The research objectives represent the performance analysis and validation of the system over both 2.5G and 3G networks. Real-time robotic tele-ultrasonography over the mobile networks is a challenging task in terms of reliable, delaysensitive and medically acceptable quality of service. The approaches made to fulfil the requirements for the functional modalities of the system, were based on the performance matrices of the system on both the simulated and real-network environments. These testing matrices were covering the performance of the wireless path, wired path and the end-to-end connectivity of the system, and can be summarised as the; compression ratio of the transmitted medical ultrasound images, data throughput, Latency, delay Jitter, Round Trip Time and Packet loss. The major part of the study concentrated on the asymmetry nature of the end-to-end data interaction, therefore the Uplink channel characteristics of the Patient station, were under comprehensive investigations on its feasibility for the system medical QoS over the both communication networks (2.5G and 3G). The research tasks were implemented over both simulated environment and on real operating network, and most of the data dealt with were real data acquired from the field. The achieved results were analyzed and furthermore comparative performances between simulated and real network were discussed and justified. The first approach made, was addressing the capability of the OPRS (2.5G) network and its limitations to perform real-time ultrasonography operation. That was an essential sub task investigation towards specific and deeper analysis on the performance of the system over the promising UMTS (3G) network, where the controlled ultrasound data transmission in real-time were investigated and the results thoroughly analyzed. The achieved results analysis of the subtasks mentioned, formed the bases to study the ultrasound transmission objectively, that fulfilling the medical QoS requirements when performing real-time tele-ultrasound medical session, these are precisely the image size, image quality and frame rate. To improve the medical QoS over relatively unreliable environments (wireless), a new adaptation technique for enhanced wireless ultrasound streaming was developed for OTELO environment and the performance results presented. The results of this research show the successful transmission of robotically acquired medical images and diagnostically acceptable quality medical video streams in 30 wireless network environment. It provides an important and essential knowledge on M-health systems, when close loop robot control, Delay sensitive and Real-time Telemedicine is required. Future work in this area is also presented for enhanced performance of this mobile robotic telemedical system especially for future use in 3.5G and 4G mobile environments.
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