The Remote Real-time Post-processing For Medical Images

Medical images with different image-forming devices contained lots of medical information of the diseases, which greatly enriched the doctor’s diagnosis means and improved the efficiency and accuracy of the diagnosis. Meanwhile, with the improvement of living standards, people had an increasing demand for high quality medical image resources. Usually, medical imaging equipments were expensive, which leaded to uneven distribution of medical resources. So not everyone could enjoy a high quality service of medical imaging diagnosis. Besides, the data exchange barriers between different medical institutions brought repetitive examinations to the patients when they referraled in different hospitals, which increased the medical costs and caused extra damage on them. Depending on remote rendering technology, new medical models, scan as remote medical and online medical based on medical image, gradually arose. They provided a new way to optimizing the medical resources and also provides a new solution to the above problem.This paper studied the key technologies of remote real-time post-processing for medical images. This research designed and implemented architectures and communication protocols for remotely post-processing medical images in real time both in the Client/Server (C/S) and Browser/Server (B/S) modes. In addition, the technologies were validated and applied in the in a real environment. The main content of this article was as follows.Designing the architecture of remote real-time post-processing for medical imaging. The architecture supports accessing medical images existing in hospital in a variety of ways, processing medical images in real time by means of remote rendering and viewing the rendering results of the medical images in the client/server (C/S) and browser/server (B/S) modes. The architecture take the decoupling scheme to adapt the multi-user concurrent characteristics of the web application, which supported loading balancing and extending the system freely. In order to enhance the interaction experience in the wireless network, an automatic feedback regulation mechanism was acted on the render parameter. An application system follow this architecture was realized. The system’s robustness and the remote rendering performance with different rendering algorithms in various the network environments, rendering resolutions and image quality factors were evaluatedDesigning the post-processing protocol for medical image (PPMI) and defining the Grammar, semantics, and timing of this protocol. The protocol defined the format of operation instructions to access the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) image and their aggregate object in C/S mode, provided a verification mechanism and fault tolerance mechanism, and supported the user adding custom extensions. A system following PPMI protocol to remotely processed medical images in real time was realized. The mobile clients of this system supported remotely processing the medical images with different imaging modes and pixel formats in real time.Extending the Web Access to DICOM Persistent Object (WADO) protocol. The extension provided Web Access to the DICOM aggregate Objects and processing medical images on web in real time. Combine the PPMI and WADO-E, the user could access to medical image post-processing service on the Web client, mobile client and desktop client in real time.Combining the proposed architecture, PPMI and WADO-E protocols and analyzing their application scenarios in mobile medical, regional medical and telemedicine. Providing a practical application case. In the case, the proposed system could exchange data with the other information systems in the hospital, access the business processes and provide real-time medical image post-processing services.The new demands, such as the doctors need access medical images among different hospitals, medical staffs would communicate with others online and patient wanted to consult the illness state from doctors online, came out. Medical images were accessed remotely more and more frequently, which urgently required the medical images could be shared in the network and processed online in real time. This paper provided a feasible solution for these application requirements.