Remote and collaborative medical image visualization computing platform

Abstract

With the development of computing capability and display size in computing hardware, mobile terminals like iPhone or iPad have been more and more accepted as a tool to help radiologists to examine medical images of patients in order to give more accurate diagnostic conclusion through server. The radiologists can observe the images by interacting them with different hand gestures to translate, rotate and zoom in or out the objects in the medical images of the mobile terminals. However, because of the requirements of remote medical, we need a system that should have one kind of function-collaboration, which means that when different radiologists located at different places hold a remote teleconference to discuss the same medical images for difficult miscellaneous disease, one expert wishes that when he changes the position of object in the images the other experts will see the changes at once so that they can keep accordance all the time to talk over the focus with voice communication and other auxiliary tools. This paper developed a remote and collaborative medical image visualization system where medical experts can work collaboratively with each other. In the proposed application, the server system can file the data of patients like CT, MR images and other information. Meanwhile, the terminal clients can download the medical 2D data and rendering them on itself including 3D image reconstruction, moreover the server can also support teleconference mode that the experts in different places discuss one patient's illness with this system like in the same location of conference. Finally, the performance issues regarding the remote 3D visualization of the medical images platform over the wireless network of the proposed system were also discussed. The result demonstrated that the proposed remote and collaborative medical image visualization computing platform could provide a perfect interactive experience in the WLAN and 4G network.