On-line scalable image access for medical remote collaborative meetings

The increasing need of remote medical investigation services in the framework of collaborative multidisciplinary meetings (e.g. cancer follow-up) raises the challenge of on-line remote access of (large amount of) radiologic data in a limited period of time. This paper proposes a scalable compression framework of DICOM images providing low-latency display through low speed networks. The developed approach relies on useless information removal from images (i.e. not related with the patient body) and the exploitation of the JPEG2000 standard to achieve progressive quality encoding and access of the data. This mechanism also allows the efficient exploitation of any idle times (corresponding to on-line visual image analysis) to download the remaining data at lossless quality in a way transparent to the user, thus minimizing the perceived latency. The experiments performed in comparison with exchanging uncompressed or JPEGlossless compressed DICOM data, showed the benefit of the proposed approach for collaborative on-line remote diagnosis and follow-up services.