A practice of a collaborative multipoint medical teleconsultation system on broadband network

The paper presents and discusses a collaborative teleconsultation system built on next generation network (NGN) transmission considerations. Considering the capability of merging medical images with multimedia data and real-time video conferencing in transmission provided by NGN networks, the system is built with computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), DICOM standard, security functions, and image processing/analysis tools. The built-in CSCW creates a collaborative consultation environment for synchronous interactive face-to-face discussion. The security functions provide the privacy and integrity in patient data transmission. The DICOM standard enables the medical image access to the PACS connecting with various imaging modalities. The image processing/analysis tools supported by CSCW functions provide useful tools for physicians to examine the images, and short-code messages are defined to transmit the image operation command for maintaining the system consistency between users. These functions are discussed and tested on the NGN network transmission for its characteristics including transmission latency, jitter, data loss rate, and multicast performance. The experiments show that adopting the shortcode message drastically reduces the bandwidth requirement and also the user waiting time, under which the basic bandwidth requirement of the system during consultation is about 160 Kbps. The security functions occupy 92 ms and 83 ms for encryption and decryption, respectively, for a 518-Kbytes image file. The multicast transmission technology is adopted to avoid the increase of network traffic when the number of participants expands. The experiments also show that the use of tunneling slightly increases overhead; however, the system can be deployed on the network without supporting IP multicasting via tunneling.