Wireless Medical Ultrasound Video Transmission Through Noisy Channels

Recent advances in video compression such as the current state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard in conjunction with increasingly available bitrate through new technologies like 3G, and WiMax have brought mobile health (m-Health) healthcare systems and services closer to reality. Despite this momentum towards m-Health systems and especially e-Emergency systems, wireless channels remain error prone, while the absence of objective quality metrics limits the ability of providing medical video of adequate diagnostic quality at a required bitrate. In this paper we investigate different encoding schemes and loss rates in medical ultrasound video transmission and come to conclusions involving efficiency, the trade-off between bitrate and quality, while we highlight the relationship linking video quality and the error ratio of corrupted P and B frames. More specifically, we investigate IPPP, IBPBP and IBBPBBP coding structures under packet loss rates of 2%, 5%, 8% and 10% and derive that the latter attains higher SNR ratings in all tested cases. A preliminary clinical evaluation shows that for SNR ratings higher than 30 db, video diagnostic quality may be adequate, while above 30.5 db the diagnostic information available in the reconstructed ultrasound video is close to that of the original.