Compression and Transmission of RF Signals for Telediagnosis

Abstract

Health care is a critical issue nowadays. Much emphasis is given to quality care for all people. Telediagnosis has attracted public attention. We propose a new method of ultrasound image transmission for telediagnosis. In conventional methods, video image signals are transmitted. In our method, the RF signals which are acquired by an ultrasound probe, are transmitted. The RF signals can be transformed to color Doppler images or high-resolution images by a receiver. Because a stored form is adopted, the proposed system can be realized with existent technology such as hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) and file transfer protocol (FTP). In this paper, we describe two lossless compression methods which specialize in the transmission of RF signals. One of the methods uses the characteristics of the RF signal. In the other method, the amount of the data is reduced. Measurements were performed in water targeting an iron block and triangular Styrofoam. Additionally, abdominal fat measurement was performed. Our method achieved a compression rate of 13% with 8 bit data.