Compression of Biomedical Images and Signals

Chapter 11

Transmission of Compressed Medical Data on Fixed and Mobile Networks

11.1. Introduction

An objective of the present chapter will have to be a detailed discussion about the aspect of medical data diffusion (broadcasting or transmission). This encompasses access to medical information, by fixed networks (wired Internet, for example) or mobile networks (wireless communication) or a combination of both fixed and mobile networks (called hybrid networks).

There are numerous situations where this type of information exchange can be encountered, either for remote consultations inside buildings, or outside, or combining the two environments, or even for ambulatory assistance, under the same conditions of geographical variability.

The main difficulty in transmitting such compressed data results from the highly fragile nature of the data. This fragility can arise due to perturbations, which can happen during the transmission, because of errors, packet losses, etc.). At the same time, there can be several other causes of uncertainty in the data. These may arise, for example, as a result of compression techniques, which can also integrate the watermarking phase, or due to the choice of modulation technique, once the bit stream is obtained, from the random access procedure (degradation, unguaranteed rate, etc.), routing, etc. At the end of the chain, a process of quality assessment (as described in Chapter 5) will be carried out, as a function of the usage, to discern whether the ...