Design And Implementation Of Video Consulting System Of Ultrasound Telemedicine

In recent years,due to its little harm to human health and convenient operations,ultrasounds are increasingly popular even in community hospitals,and have become the most utilized form of diagnostic imaging available today.However,ultrasound scanning are highly operator-dependent examinations,the quality of the results depends to a large extent on the skill of the technologist or doctor operating the transducer.Although there are some most advanced medical equipments and excellent doctors’resources in the third-grade class-A hospitals of large and medium-sized cities,more patients and miscellaneous difficult diseases has led to a huge burden on ultrasonography and insufficient time for examination.If a young doctor hasn’t got supported by a senior physician in time,misdiagnosis occurs now and then.At the same time,the medical conditions in the township community hospitals are obviously lagging behind.There are less good doctors and advanced medical equipments.The doctors have often got puzzled with some complicated cases due to lack of experience,which may deteriorate the condition of a patient.All these issues will result in unnecessary medical disputes and affect the normal doctor-patient relationship.In order to provide the people of remote areas high-quality ultrasound services and reduce inequality of ultrasound examinations over different areas,the government has promulgated a series of relevant policies to strengthen the quality control of ultrasonography and promote doctors’ diagnosis and treatment skills at all hospital classes.The policies include carrying out ultrasound training in the third-grade class-A hospitals to improve the skill of junior doctors’ operation in primary hospitals,or sending senior doctors of advanced hospitals to primary ones for assistance.Although these methods can improve diagnosis and treatment quality of primary medical institutions to a certain extent,the current training mode and quality control system are difficult to meet the growing demands of ultrasonic diagnosis due to its operator-dependent nature.With the development of internet technology,the new telemedicine consulting system platform paves a new way for ultrasonic quality control.However,as the system is very complicated in infrastructure,which results in its high cost in the terminals,as well as the sevice fee of conversation is high over affordability of families with medium income,it is hard to extend to the rural areas.Therefore,developing an effective way for video&audio quality control of ultrasound telemedicine,improving the quality of ultrasonic diagnosis of all hospital doctors have extremely practical significance to alleviate the imbalance in the distribution of ultrasound medical resources in our country.Based on the " Guideline for Ultrasonic Quality Control in Tier-3 Hospitals"issued by the ultrasound society of physicians of Chinese medical doctor association,as well as the internet streaming media technology with the features of "compression,packaging,transmission,streaming".We have designed and implemented a video consulting system of ultrasound telemedicine.The system complies with the main streaming media protocols RTP,RTCP,RTSP and the high-performance audio and video codec protocols H.264,AAC,and makes use of the features of streaming transfer and playing while transmitting.Live ultrasound videos of the ultrasound are transmitted to the chief supervisors in real time,and the quality control of the ultrasound diagnosis process is accomplished through supervision,evaluation and remote assistance of the directors.The system hence can be constituted by the conventional hardwares of streaming media technology with low cost.In the real-time transmission of ultrasound live videos,using intelligent packet loss and cache follow-up strategy ensures the real-time data transmission with high quality.In addition,the system supports the dynamic deployment of client nodes,each hospital can be regarded as a parent node in a cloud-based ultrasound network,all hospitals in the clouds constitute an ultrasounic video consulting system.The video consulting system of ultrasound telemedicine is composed of some streaming media servers,consulting clients and expert monitoring clients.All softwares are coded by C++ language based on the VS2015 platform.Now,the system has been successfully deployed in the department of ultrasound of Jiangsu Provincial People’s Hospital and has played a key role in remotely assisting in diagnosis and quality control in ultrasound operative procedures.Through the test and evaluation of the system from the perspective of delay and image quality,it shows that the system has qualified with low delay and high performance,hence it can be a feasible solution in practice.