Open-Source Telemedicine Platform for Wireless Medical Video Communication

An m-health system for real-time wireless communication of medical video based on open-source software is presented. The objective is to deliver a low-cost telemedicine platform which will allow for reliable remote diagnosis m-health applications such as emergency incidents, mass population screening, and medical education purposes. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated using five atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. The videos are encoded at the clinically acquired resolution, in addition to lower, QCIF, and CIF resolutions, at different bitrates, and four different encoding structures. Commercially available wireless local area network (WLAN) and 3.5G high-speed packet access (HSPA) wireless channels are used to validate the developed platform. Objective video quality assessment is based on PSNR ratings, following calibration using the variable frame delay (VFD) algorithm that removes temporal mismatch between original and received videos. Clinical evaluation is based on atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video assessment protocol. Experimental results show that adequate diagnostic quality wireless medical video communications are realized using the designed telemedicine platform. HSPA cellular networks provide for ultrasound video transmission at the acquired resolution, while VFD algorithm utilization bridges objective and subjective ratings

Short Block-length Codes for Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications

This paper reviews the state of the art channel coding techniques for ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC). The stringent requirements of URLLC services, such as ultra-high reliability and low latency, have made it the most challenging feature of the fifth generation (5G) mobile systems. The problem is even more challenging for the services beyond the 5G promise, such as tele-surgery and factory automation, which require latencies less than 1ms and failure rate as low as $10^{-9}$. The very low latency requirements of URLLC do not allow traditional approaches such as re-transmission to be used to increase the reliability. On the other hand, to guarantee the delay requirements, the block length needs to be small, so conventional channel codes, originally designed and optimised for moderate-to-long block-lengths, show notable deficiencies for short blocks. This paper provides an overview on channel coding techniques for short block lengths and compares them in terms of performance and complexity. Several important research directions are identified and discussed in more detail with several possible solutions.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Magazin

Advanced digital modulation: Communication techniques and monolithic GaAs technology

Communications theory and practice are merged with state-of-the-art technology in IC fabrication, especially monolithic GaAs technology, to examine the general feasibility of a number of advanced technology digital transmission systems. Satellite-channel models with (1) superior throughput, perhaps 2 Gbps; (2) attractive weight and cost; and (3) high RF power and spectrum efficiency are discussed. Transmission techniques possessing reasonably simple architectures capable of monolithic fabrication at high speeds were surveyed. This included a review of amplitude/phase shift keying (APSK) techniques and the continuous-phase-modulation (CPM) methods, of which MSK represents the simplest case

Depth map compression via 3D region-based representation

In 3D video, view synthesis is used to create new virtual views between encoded camera views. Errors in the coding of the depth maps introduce geometry inconsistencies in synthesized views. In this paper, a new 3D plane representation of the scene is presented which improves the performance of current standard video codecs in the view synthesis domain. Two image segmentation algorithms are proposed for generating a color and depth segmentation. Using both partitions, depth maps are segmented into regions without sharp discontinuities without having to explicitly signal all depth edges. The resulting regions are represented using a planar model in the 3D world scene. This 3D representation allows an efficient encoding while preserving the 3D characteristics of the scene. The 3D planes open up the possibility to code multiview images with a unique representation.Postprint (author's final draft