Development of the Healthcare support e-Hospital system at the Local Area using digital-watermarking technology

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research proposes a new concept called "e-hospital". Our propose e-hospital unites distributed medical resources such as clinic, hospital and patient's home by the Internet communication technologies. The e-hospital provides integrated high quality medical services with low-cost. This paper describes our newly developed fundamental techniques for our e-hospital.This e-hospital system deals with vital data and medical image data such as CT and MR images. The vital data measured at patient's home is automatically stored in "Vital server of the home" from the measurement devices. The stored vital data will be transmitting to "Home doctor's server" via Internet. Hospital imaging center also transmit the patient's medical images to the Home doctor's server via Internet. Home doctor's server integrates these patient's vital data and medical images automatically. The e-hospital provides secured Internet communication for these data transfer by using our proposed watermarking techniques. … More This watermarking technique has two functions. One is to hide the medical image in dummy images for discourage cracking image servers. Another one is for automatically inserting a copyright image into the medical images preserving originality and ownership of the medical images. By using our proposed watermarking technology, medical images are protected.The transmitting time for patient's one-month watermarked vital data (6.67kB) is about 0.14 sec via Internet. And the transmission time of one watermarked CT study (200slices) is about 74 second with the same transmission condition. The extracted medical images possess good quality for physician's diagnosis. Moreover, it is possible to consult freely in e-hospital system through the TV camera between the patient and the home doctor. The patient was satisfied in doing an enough consultation as the home doctor with e-hospital system.The e-hospital deals with not only medical image data but also patient vital data. That is, the region functions as one hospital. The e-hospital system that uses a secured Internet communication becomes a total patient health care system, which connects patients, home doctors, and hospital imaging centers. Less