Robust Multilayer Control for Enhanced Wireless Telemedical Video Streaming

Abstract

M-health is an emerging area of research and one of the key challenges in future research in this area is medical video streaming over wireless channels. Contrasting requirements of almost lossless compression and low available bandwidth have to be tackled in medical quality video streaming in ultrasound and radiology applications. On one side, compression techniques need to be conservative, in order to avoid removing perceptively important information; on the other side, error resilience and correction should be provided, with the constraint of a limited bandwidth. A quality-driven, network-aware approach for joint source and channel coding based on a controller structure specifically designed for enhanced video streaming in a robotic teleultrasonography system is presented. The designed application based on robotic teleultrasonography is described and the proposed method is simulated in a wireless environment in two different scenarios; the video quality improvement achievable through the proposed scheme in such an application is remarkable, resulting in a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) improvement of more than 4 dB in both scenarios.