KEYWORDS: Medical imaging, Picture Archiving and Communication System, Databases, Imaging informatics, Data communications, Medical imaging modalities, Telemedicine, Medical research, Content based image retrieval, Prototyping
Medical image databases are growing at a rapid rate because of the increase in digital medical imaging modalities and the deployment of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and telemedicine applications. There is growing research interest in Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) of medical images from such digital archives. A new distance function for CBIR is presented for measuring the similarity between two images. The distance function is a variant of relative entropy, or the Kullback-Liebler distance. The new distance is the sum of the relative entropy of the two images to each other. The latter is a symmetric non-negative function and is only zero when the two images have identical probability distributions. This method has been implemented in a prototype system and has been applied to a database of medical images. Initial results demonstrate improvements over L1-norm and L2-norm histogram matching. The method is computationally simple since it does not require image segmentation. It is invariant to translation, rotation and scaling. The method has also been extended to support retrieval based on Region-Of-Interest (ROI) queries.
The JPEG2000 image compression standard provides many features to support interactive access to large images. These include efficient lossless and lossy compression, resolution scalability, quality scalability, region of interest coding and spatial random access. The ISO/IEC JPEG committee is in the process of finalizing the JPEG2000 Internet Protocol (JPIP) standard for interacting with JPEG2000 files. JPIP is tightly coupled to JPEG2000 and provides a powerful and flexible client-server architecture. By combining JPIP and JPEG2000 it is possible to store only one compressed file at the server and transmit the resolution, quality, and Window Of Interest (WOI) specified by the client, without having to transmit or decode the entire code-stream. This minimizes server computation, storage and bandwidth. It also reduces the latency for the client. By sending only the data that the client needs the effective compression ratio for client-server applications can be much higher than the file size compression ratio. A prototype JPIP client/server implementation is used to demonstrate resolution scalability, quality scalability and spatial random access of medical images. Efficiency, latency improvements and PSNR quality of the received images are measured as a function of the number of bytes transferred from the server to the client. The choice of JPEG2000 compression parameters, such as precincts and tiles, and the trade-offs of stateful and stateless sessions are discussed. The inclusion of radiology reports as metadata in image files is also demonstrated.
In this paper, we present the design architecture and the implementation status of WebPresent - a world wide web based tele-presentation tool. This tool allows a physician to use a conference server workstation and make a presentation of patient cases to a geographically distributed audience. The audience consists of other physicians collaborating on patients' health care management and physicians participating in continuing medical education. These physicians are at several locations with networks of different bandwidth and capabilities connecting them. Audiences also receive the patient case information on different computers ranging form high-end display workstations to laptops with low-resolution displays. WebPresent is a scalable networked multimedia tool which supports the presentation of hypertext, images, audio, video, and a white-board to remote physicians with hospital Intranet access. WebPresent allows the audience to receive customized information. The data received can differ in resolution and bandwidth, depending on the availability of resources such as display resolution and network bandwidth.
Mehran Moshfeghi, Tony Chou, Hein Haas, H. Huang, William Lord, Joachim Schmidt, Jun Wang, Thomas Wendler, Stephen Wong, Yuan-Pin Yu, Christian Zellner
In this paper we present the methods and results of a workflow study of a multi-specialty cardiology conference, preliminary design concepts for a digital cardiac conference room, and a component that is anticipated for a complete implementation. Workflow studies at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center were performed to understand its traditional catheterization conference work procedures and processes. These studies involved observing and interviewing people that prepare, present, and attend the conference. The workflow investigation gave insight into current drawbacks. Scenarios were then generated that described potential new designs of the cardiac catheterization conference.Knowledge gained from the workflow studies, and feedback from UCSF physicians whose reviewed the digital conference room scenarios led to the final system design. We have prototype one of the components of the design: a software tool for improved presentation of dynamic images. This tool has been implemented in Java and is therefore platform independent.
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