Computer Imagery and Multimedia Techniques for Supporting Telemedicine Diagnoses
Qinglian Guo, Katsunobu Muroi, Mieko Ohsuga · 2003
Telemedicine involves delivering medical diagnoses and health-care advice to distant patients. A nurse providing clinical advice over the telephone is the simplest example. Recent telemedicine systems, however, have typically used advanced image and audio capabilities by exploiting ongoing technical advances in communications, imaging, and multimedia. The object of our current research is to provide medical doctors with patient images in a wider visual field and higher in resolution during a telemedicine diagnosis. To achieve this, computer image processing and multimedia techniques are used in constructing our telemedicine system. The creative functions of this system provide a medical theater with more information about the patient and enable a more effective and accurate telemedicine diagnosis to be carried out. We discuss the background of this research and describe the limitations and problems of existing telemedicine systems. Then we present a global view of our system construction and highlight its advanced features. Next we present our special devices for inputting (catching) a patient's image and how to automatically composite wide- and high-resolution images from small pieces of images (digital imagery mosaicking techniques). Finally we present our human interface for supporting medical doctors' operations, and discuss the limitations of the system, and give a description of future work.