Mobile Medical Image Viewing Using 3G Wireless Network

Abstract

Teleradiology is a routine practice for radiologists to make urgent diagnosis by remote viewing radiological images such as computed tomographic (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), computed radiographic (CR), and digital radiographic (DR) images outside their hospitals. Traditionally, due to limited network bandwidth and huge image file sizes, this technique was limited to fixed-point communication using an integrated services digital network (ISDN) and broadband network. Without any prior information, most radiologists would invariably require high-quality display units and lossless compressed images for their clinical diagnosis. Besides the technical issues involved in the uninterrupted provision of a 24- hour teleradiology service, most hospital administrators have to consider a series of management issues on the quality of this service such as data confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility. This article presents the implementation process of a high-quality teleradiology service using the third-generation (3G) wireless network. In the provision of this service, several high-quality notebook computers with a 15-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen of resolution 1,024 x 768 pixels and 32-bit color have been configured to view medical images in the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) format using a Web browser. These notebook computers are connected with 3G mobile phones so that users could access the Internet using Web browsers through the 3G network at a speed of at least 384 kbps. The users could also use the Web browser for logging into the hospital network through an application tunneling technique in a virtual private network (VPN). When logging into the VPN, for security purposes the network authentication is enhanced by a one-time and two-factor authentication (OTTFA) mechanism. In OTTFA, the user password contains two parts: a personal password and a randomly generated password. After successfully logging into the hospital network, the user has to log into the image server using another account name and password. The above are all important to ensure the high standard of confidentiality of the system.