802.11s QoS Routing for Telemedicine Service

The merits of 802.11s as the wireless mesh network standard provide a lowcost and high independent scalability telemedicine infrastructure. However,challenges in degradation of performance as hops increase and the absent of Quality of Service (QoS) provision need to be resolved. The reliability and timely manner are the important factor for successful telemedicine service. This research investigates the use of 802.11s for telemedicine services. A new model of 802.11s based telemedicine infrastructure has been developed for this purpose. A non deterministic polynomial path selection is proposed to provide end-to-end QoS provisioning in 802.11s. A multi-metric called QoS Price metric is proposed as measurement of link quality. The QoS Price is derived from multi layers values that reflect telemedicine traffic requirement and the resource availability of the network. The proposed solution has modified the path management of 802.11s and added resource allocation in distributed scheme.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v4i2.559

Emergency Prenatal Telemonitoring System in Wireless Mesh Network

Telemedicine promises a great opportunity for health care service improvement. However, it has several issues for its implementation in certain area. They include communication service quality, infrastructure and operational cost. Since Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is designed to reduce the infrastructure cost and operational cost, an investigation of network performance for implementation of telemedicine is required.  In this paper, a simulation to investigate the wireless mesh network quality of service.  Using network simulator 2, The QoS performance analysis was performed in different routing protocol scenarios of proposed system. It showed that OLSR protocol for Mesh Network maintained the time transfer of the EPT data. The field testing of the proposed system to measure the distance with various time has already been done.  The infrastructure has been also implemented using low cost 5.8 GHz transceiver for backhauls and low cost 2.4 GHz transceiver for clients.  Test result shows that the low cost telemedicine system is able to do real time communication between patient and medical staff with medical data rate up to 2 Mbps. It shows that telemonitoring system using wireless mesh network can give a low cost application in emergency time with acceptable medical data transfer quality.

Computer based x-ray computed tomography training system for engineering education

X-ray computed tomography (called CT) scanner is a powerful and widely used medical imaging modality in the hospital. The CT machine is very expensive and it can produce dangerous radiation when a person operates the machine. This makes it difficult for biomedical engineers and radiographer students to learn its working principles. In order to overcome this problem, a computer based CT scanner trainer system has been developed. The system is implemented using National Instrument’s Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW). At the beginning, it was started with the studying of existing CT scan machine. After gathering information, development process continued to develop generator component, x-ray tube subsystem, detector subsystem, imaging subsystem, and finally is reconstruction subsystem. The trainer system that has been developed is able to be used to train students on how to use CT scanner especially to get high quality images with lowest possible radiation. This will help biomedical engineers and radiographer students to have a better understanding of CT scanner in term of its working principle and to prevent radiation hazard during the learning process

Comparative evaluation of medical thermal image enhancement techniques for breast cancer detection

Thermography is a potential medical imaging modality due to its capability in providing additional physiological information. Medical thermal images obtained from infrared thermography systems incorporate valuable temperature properties and profiles, which could indicate underlying abnormalities. The quality of thermal images is often degraded due to noise, which affects the measurement processes in medical imaging. Contrast stretching and image filtering techniques are normally adopted in medical image enhancement processes. In this study, a comparative evaluation of contrast stretching and image filtering on individual channels of true color thermal images was conducted. Their individual performances were quantitatively measured using mean square error (MSE) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The results obtained showed that contrast stretching altered the temperature profile of the original image while image filtering appeared to enhance the original image with no changes in its profile. Further measurement of both MSE and PSNR showed that the Wiener filtering method outperformed other filters with an average MSE value of 0.0045 and PSNR value of 78.739 dB. Various segmentation methods applied to both filtered and contrast stretched images proved that the filtering method is preferable for in-depth analysis

Feasibility study of breast cancer risk monitoring using thermography technique in Malaysia

Breast cancer remains as a serious health issue in Malaysia and most presentation of breast cancer incidences are at the later stage which will reduce the survival rate. Breast Self-Examination for all women (BSE), Clinical Breast Examination for women above 40 years old (CBE) and Mammography for the older and high-risk groups are the current policies that are available in the government hospitals and selected clinics. However, BSE and CBE could not detect the early stage breast cancer while Mammography is less sensitive in detecting tumor in high dense breast tissue. Both factors have caused an increase in the overall percentage of later stage presentation of breast cancer in Malaysia. In this paper, a feasibility study of breast cancer screening and risk monitoring using Thermography technique is presented. Thermography technique is capable in identifying any physiological changes occur prior to lump formation. This technique is simple, cheaper, and produce no radiation which will allow a safe regular screening. In this study, a series of screenings has been performed on carcinogenic induced rats and thermal images acquired were then analyzed for risk monitoring. Visual analysis shown that the presence of hotspot and asymmetrical temperature profile could be an indicator of a high risk patient while temperature measurement on both induced and control groups shows a significant difference in standard deviation of the surface temperature with smaller deviation of 0.31±0.08 observed in control group while bigger deviation of 2.23±0.78 observed in the induced group. Hence, it is shown that Thermography technique could be a potential modality for upfront breast screening in Malaysi

Comparative Evaluation of Medical Thermal Image Enhancement Techniques for Breast Cancer Detection

Thermography is a potential medical imaging modality due to its capability in providing additional physiological information. Medical thermal images obtained from infrared thermography systems incorporate valuable temperature properties and profiles, which could indicate underlying abnormalities. The quality of thermal images is often degraded due to noise, which affects the measurement processes in medical imaging. Contrast stretching and image filtering techniques are normally adopted in medical image enhancement processes. In this study, a comparative evaluation of contrast stretching and image filtering on individual channels of true color thermal images was conducted. Their individual performances were quantitatively measured using mean square error (MSE) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The results obtained showed that contrast stretching altered the temperature profile of the original image while image filtering appeared to enhance the original image with no changes in its profile. Further measurement of both MSE and PSNR showed that the Wiener filtering method outperformed other filters with an average MSE value of 0.0045 and PSNR value of 78.739 dB. Various segmentation methods applied to both filtered and contrast stretched images proved that the filtering method is preferable for in-depth analysis

User requirement analysis: online thalassemia management system for Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Malaysia

The care process of patients suffering from thalassemia involves continuous and complex care procedures, which produce a large volume of diverse data. This makes the management of the patient records using paper-based system cumbersome. Information technology (IT) is an essential factor in the administration of healthcare where it can improves health care quality and service. Besides that, it provides more accurate and timely information regarding patient care. Consequently, the adoption of IT tools such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in hospitals is a solution to reduce some barriers in the healthcare services. This solution may improve the effectiveness of chronic disease management such as thalassemia, since a lot of the patient’s data will be stored and retrieved due to the frequent monitoring and treatment. In order to facilitate successful adoption of an EMR, involvement of end-users would be essentially required during the designing, implementation and usage phase. In this study, an EMR specifically design for thalassemia patient management is proposed to be implemented in Hospital Sultanah Aminah, Johor, Malaysia. The user requirement analysis (URA) of the proposed system, Online Thalassemia Management System (OTMS), is investigated and discussed in this article

Classification of mental tasks using de-noised EEG signals

The wsvelet based de-noising can bc eiiiployed ivi[li ihc combii.~ation of different kind of threshold parameters. tlwesliold operators. mother wavelets and timsliold rescaling methods. The central issue i.n wavelet bassd de-noising method is the selection of an appropriate ilircshold paraiiwters. If the tlmsliold is too small. the signal is still noisy but if it is too large. iiiiportant signal Cc;itiires might lost. This study will inyestigate the cfl'ectivcness of Tour Qpes of threshold parameters i.e. t lircshold selections based on Stein's Unbiased Risk Esliriiate (SURE,). Universal. Heuristic and Minimax. Auioregressiite Burg model with order sis is employed to cstmct rcle\*ani features froin the clean signals. These Icmrcs are classificd into five classes of mental tasks via :in iinificial neural nctwork. Tlie results show that the rate of correct classification varies with different tlucsliolds. From this study. it shows that the de-noised EEG signal tvitli heuristic threshold selection outperform lhe others. Soft tl~esholding procedure and sym8 as the mother U aixlcl arc adoptcd in this study

The effect of noise removing on emotional classification

This paper explains the issues of study that was designed to evaluate the effect of denoising algorithm to detect emotional expression through Electroencephalogram (EEG). This research led to classify the EEG features due to emotion which was induced by the facial expression stimulus include of happy and sad and neutral cases. Event-related potential (ERP) method was selected to probe the ability of Independent components analysis (ICA) and principal components analysis (PCA) as denoising mathematical tool which is used for data preprocessing. The features were extracted by common spatial patterns (CSP) to decrease the dimensions of data. After that extracted components was classified by support vector machine (SVM) to show the effect of noise removing on data classification. The results show that ICA could provide the most accurate result for classifying emotional states in brain activity than other methods. However, the PCA was not shown a very different and inaccurate classification results