MobMivs: Implementing an Efficient Medical Image Visualization System for Mobile Telemedicine

As medical devices have excellent resolutions and have become better connected to the Internet, doctors and patients are beginning to expect medical images to be available on mobile device for making a diagnosis or consultative viewing. However, the performance of querying and accessing medical images in anytime and anywhere using mobile device is still an issue. In this paper, we implement an medical image visualization system to efficiently query and access medical images by using smartphone, which has the following new features: 1) an on-demand data transmission method is implemented using DICOM web service, and only the required meta data and image region or series are transmitted to mobile device; 2) a high performance cache component is designed to cache the recently requested images, which takes up less storage and obtains higher performance; 3) a convenient way is introduced to quickly obtain a specific patient's studies by scanning a patient's barcode or quick response code. The performance and stability of our proposed method as well as the prototype system is evaluated with real DICOM data sets. The results show that our app obtains high performance and stability in both Wi-Fi and 4G mobile network, which is expected to be an effective tool for mobile telemedicine.