Data Compression as a Base for eHealth Interoperability

Abstract

eHealth is a set of systems and services that enable the sharing of medical diagnostic imaging data remotely. The application of eHealth solves the problem of the lack of specialized personnel, unnecessary execution of multiple diagnostic imaging and rapid exchange of information and remote diagnostics. Medical imaging generates large amounts of data. An MRI study can contain up to several Gigabytes (GB). The exchange of such large amounts of data in the local network facilities is a significant problem due to bandwidth sharing which is even more significant in mobile and wireless networks. A possible solution to this problem is data compression with the requirement that there is no loss of data. The goal of this chapter is a conceptual compression prototype that will allow faster and more efficient exchange of medical images in systems with limited bandwidth and communication speeds (cellular networks, wireless networks). To obtain this conceptual compression prototype we will use wavelets.