A Video Transmission Framework Using Components and Multi-Agent Systems

International audienceThis paper presents an application of video transmission over Internet, which goal is to be used in a cooperative plat- form. This application uses proxies during the transmission to adapt the video (changing the size, the framerate and/or the encoding format). Adaptation is a necessity in this kind of application, due to the diversity of receivers (computers, mobile phones, PDA . . . ). During the design process, we chose to use component ori- ented programming and multi-agent systems. We present here how these two paradigms help us to have a flexible and evolutive application, and, for each transmission?s step, what is the most appropriated solution. At the end, we also present tests that have been made to evaluate the power needed by the proxies in order to discuss about benefits that can be brought by our architecture

Groups partitionning over CORBA for Cooperative Work

International audienceMany examples illustrate the usefulness of group partitioning in distributed systems. The process group abstraction is a powerful tool for the development of fault-tolerant distributed applications. This solution is also particularly relevant to group entities sharing similar properties or stakes when applied to the field of cooperative work. When dealing with distributed applications, communication standards have evolved from socket-based interfaces to Remote Procedure Calls and nowadays, towards distributed object platforms like CORBA. This standard from the Object Management Group masks distribution and heterogeneity and provides a good basis for distributed application development. This paper presents a review of group mechanisms found in the literature then focuses on the implementation of groups over CORBA. An implementation of such a service over CORBA illustrates the impact of group auto-organization. Performance we obtain show that our service is efficient and provides good mechanisms to manage operations in a group

Virtual Awareness Card for adaptability in Collaborative Virtual Environments

International audienceThis article exposes the concept of Virtual Awareness Card in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE). This concept allows users to send information about their preferences and their hardware and software properties. Our approach is focused on the Awareness in order to use the awareness information to ensure the adaptability of various sites in the collaborative environment. The VAC is used in the CVE during the synchronous and asynchronous sessions to assure a collaborative work using heterogeneous support and multitude tools. VAC concept is based on three awareness directives: Convenience Awareness, Preferential Awareness and Restrictive Awareness. The goal is ultimately to offer adapted workspace to increase the awareness among the collaborators. In function of information of Virtual Awareness Card, collaborators can interact with more possibilities and make more efficient use of workspace functionalities. We'll show with several scenarios the use of the VAC in CVE of telemedicine to show the increase of possibilities offered by this concept

Use of Multi-Watermarking Schema to Maintain Awareness in a Teleneurology Diagnosis Platform

Following the tremendous evolution of transferring images through the Internet, it is necessary to ensure security during this act, especially for medical images. The application of multiple watermarking tech- nique represents a solution to preserve the security of such data on the one hand, and the traceability of medical diagnoses made by doctors on the other hand. This falls under the remote collaborative work. This technique is applied in the TeNeCi (Collaborative tele-neurology) platform. The project allows practitioners to distribute the analyses of the medical images. In fact, we used the multiple watermarking technique in a wavelet field. The theory underlying this technique is to hide information in the medical image and at the same time to ensure its imperceptibility. The diagnosis made by the practitioner is the data inserted in the image. The fundamental challenge of this paper is how to hide the total diagnoses of each practitioner in the image ensuring a good quality of the image at the same time

Adaptative Image Flow in Collaborative Medical Telediagnosis Environments

International audienceTelemedicine, the application of telecommunication in the medicine field, has been developed to meet major problems encountered in connecting doctors with patients and other medical staff. Having a robust and efficient telemedical system has always been a challenge. The system needs to make the members in different locations capable of sharing medical data efficiently and without errors. In this work, we present a telemedical system that overcomes these challenges.We deploy a collaborative system and adapt data to store, visualize, modify and transfer fluorescence images efficiently and robustly at the same time. We also make the system adaptive to communicate across different client platforms. We conduct experiments comparing our method with traditional collaborative system, and all results confirm our system is over others in terms of efficiency and robustness

Collaborative Interactions for Medical e-Diagnosis

International audienceThe Network and Distributed Systems Group within the University of Franche-Comte's computer research lab (LIFC) gained solid expertise on medical e-diagnosis in the area of remote collaboration through continued research and findings. TeNeCi (Cooperative Teleneurology) is a European remote diagnosis project applied to neurology developed under the aegis of INTERREGIII. INTERREGIII is a European Community Initiative program aiming at supporting cross-border, transnational and interregional co-operation in both social and economic perspectives. This paper has a dual objective: it first presents the improvements and contributions made to advance the TeNeCi project which is a research and development tool, and then it synthesizes our research work in collaborative medical e-diagnosis. The TeNeCi tool originality is to allow practitioners to act as if they were at the same diagnosis table, using a great panel of medical tools (images, software, . . . ). Collaboration and awareness features are used to make TeNeCi more efficient than classical telemedicine software in terms of collaboration level

Scars collaborative telediagnosis platform using adaptive image flow

International audienceTelemedicine has been developed to allow practitioners to remotely connect with patients and with other medical staff.We propose a new system (hardware and software), named DICODERM (COllaborative DIagnosis of DERMatosis), which makes it possible to monitor the evolution of scars after the excision of a tumorous dermatosis (like melanoma). The hardware part of this system is composed of a new optical innovative probe with which two types of images can be acquired simultaneously: anatomic with a white light image and functional with a fluorescence image (using autofluorescence from the protoporphyrin within the cancer cell). The software part is composed of two components: the image stitching component, and the collaborative/adaptive layer component. Our system creates a panoramic view of these scars obtained by stitching a sequence of small images. We conducted experiments for different image stitching algorithms to define the best solution. We also deployed a second component: a collaborative system layer which allows to remotely share images of scars and to adapt these images. We also made the system adaptive to communicate across different client platforms. We conducted experiments to compare the exchange of images with or without adaptation: these tests showed the efficiency of our layer

An optimized algorithm of image stitching in the case of a multi-modal probe for monitoring the evolution of scars

International audienceWe propose a new system that makes possible to monitor the evolution of scars after the excision of a tumorous dermatosis. The hardware part of this system is composed of a new optical innovative probe with which two types of images can be acquired simultaneously: an anatomic image acquired under a white light and a functional one based on autofluorescence from the protoporphyrin within the cancer cells. For technical reasons related to the maximum size of the area covered by the probe, acquired images are too small to cover the whole scar. That is why a sequence of overlapping images is taken in order to cover the required area. The main goal of this paper is to describe the creation of two panoramic images (anatomic and functional). Fluorescence images do not have enough salient information for matching the images; stitching algorithms are applied over each couple of successive white light images to produce an anatomic panorama of the entire scar. The same transformations obtained from this step are used to register and stitch the functional images. Several experiments have been implemented using different stitching algorithms (SIFT, ASIFT and SURF), with various transformation parameters (angles of rotation, projection, scaling, etc...) and different types of skin images. We present the results of these experiments that propose the best solution. Thus, clinician has two panoramic images superimposed and usable for diagnostic support. A collaborative layer is added to the system to allow sharing panoramas among several practitioners over different places

A Tool for Telediagnosis of Cardiovascular Diseases in a Collaborative and Adaptive Approach

International audienceIn this paper, we present a new telediagnosis environment for the detection of cardiovascular problems. This tool, called VACODIS (VAscular COllaborative teleDIagnosiS), allows practitioners to semi-automatically identify and quantify a patient's potential cardiovascular complications. The system generates first-time automatic detection of cardiovascular abnormalities using Doppler ultrasound images. The system then provides remote collaborative sharing of this information among different doctors to allow distance telediagnostics. With this new system, different actors in the field of medicine (nurses, practitioners, etc.) will be able to contribute to a more reliable diagnosis in the cardiovascular domain

Environnement Collaboratif d'Adaptation pour le Télédiagnostic des Problèmes Vasculaires

National audienceLe travail présenté dans cet article a pour objet de fournir à la communauté médicale un outil distribué de calcul pour le télédiagnostic semi-automatique pour identifier et quantifier les complications cardio-vasculaires potentielles d'un patient : cet outil est nommé VACODIS (VAscular COllaborative teleDIagnosiS). Une première phase consiste à produire une détection automatique des anomalies cardio-vasculaires à partir d'images d'écho-doppler. La deuxième phase (qui est le cœur de ce travail informatique) consiste à partager de manière collaborative et adaptée les images et résultats de la première phase afin de favoriser un diagnostic collaboratif. Ainsi ce travail permettra à plusieurs personnels hospitaliers distants de contribuer conjointement à un diagnostic collaboratif dans le domaine cardio-vasculaire