Journal of High Speed Networks - Volume 16, issue 1

Authors: Chung, Pau-Choo | Ouyang, Yen-Chieh | Lee, San-Kan | Yang, Ching-Wen | Chang, Chein-I

Article Type: Other

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1-3, 2007

Authors: Liu, Brent J. | Zhou, Zheng | Gutierrez, Marco A. | Documet, Jorge | Chan, Lawrence | Huang, H.K.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Internet-2 is an advanced high-speed computer network, which has been widely used for medical imaging applications such as teleradiology and teleconsultation. Internet-2 can fulfill the requirements for high-speed data transmission and short turn-around time with low operation cost once installed. However, high performance may not necessarily be retained for global access from international network peers as well as commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) solutions. This paper describes the methodology of establishing international Internet-2 connections between three different internationally linked sites: the Imaging Processing and Informatics (IPI) Laboratory, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), …Hong Kong, and the Heart Institute (InCor) of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Two major factors will be discussed including network looping in the US and bottleneck of the connection, raising the round-trip time and limiting the available bandwidth respectively. In addition to the three site International Internet2 Connectivity, a consistent and repeatable tuning protocol for international Internet2 applications in the clinical environment will be presented. The experimental results of the FTP and DICOM transmission using the automatic tuning protocol at both sending and receiving sites will be presented and compared with results for the combinations where this protocol is used at either one site only or no site at all in order to demonstrate the improvement in overall network throughput by this proposed tuning method. These performance numbers will also be compared to commercially available ISP connections to further show the differences between International Internet-2 and its ability to support medical imaging applications. Show more

Keywords: International Internet-2 connectivity, research networks, bandwidth, automatic tuning protocol, PACS, DICOM compliance

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 5-20, 2007

Authors: Zhou, Z. | Gutierrez, M. | Documet, J. | Chan, L. | Huang, H.K. | Liu, B.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Clinical trials play a crucial role in testing new drugs or devices in modern clinical practice. Medical imaging has become an important tool in clinical trials because images provide a unique and fast diagnosis with visual observance and quantitative assessment. A typical imaging-based clinical trial consists of: (1) A well-defined rigorous clinical trial protocol, (2) a radiology core that has a quality control mechanism, a biostatistics component, and a server for storing and distributing data and analysis results; and (3) many field sites that generate and send clinical trial image studies to the radiology core. With ever-increasing number of clinical …trials, it becomes a great challenge for a radiology core which handles multiple clinical trials to have a robust server to administrate multiple trials as well as satisfy the requirements to quickly distribute information to participating radiologists/clinicians worldwide to assess trials' results. Data Grid in the grid computing technology can satisfy the aforementioned requirements of imaging-based clinical trials. In this paper, we present a Data Grid architecture for worldwide imaging-based clinical trials. The Data Grid testbed has been set up in three international sites: Image Processing and Informatics (IPI) Laboratory at University of Southern California, USA; the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; and InCor (Heart Institute) at Sao Paulo, Brazil. The three chosen sites are connected with high speed international networks including the Internet2, the HARNET (Hong Kong Academic and Research Network), and the Brazilian National Research and Education Network (RNP2). The concept, design and implementation of the Data Grid are presented. Grid computing technology open source software Globus Toolkit 4.0 and DICOM technology were used to implement the DICOM compliance Data Grid. This paper also describes results of using Data Grid in imaging-based clinical trails for fault tolerance image data backup. The successful implementation and evaluation of the Data Grid for imaging-based clinical trials provide three major benefits: (1) an understanding of the methodology for using data grid technology and high speed networks in clinical trails; (2) an establishment of the performance benchmarks of Data Grid over high speed networks; and (3) a Data Grid test bed for performing worldwide imaging based clinical trials. Show more

Keywords: Data Grid, Internet-2, clinical trial, medical imaging, DICOM

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 21-33, 2007

Authors: Kung, Hsu-Yang | Hsu, Chi-Yu | Lin, Mei-Hsien

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: With rapid progress in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and pervasive computing technology, development of WSN-based pervasive healthcare systems, which provide patients and healthcare professionals with a convenient and efficient e-health environment, have become one of important and popular research topics in Health Information Systems (HIS). This paper proposes a Sensor-based Pervasive Healthcare (SPH) System, which comprises the Home Healthcare End (HHE) system, E-healthcare Service Provider (ESP) and E-healthcare Control Center (ECC). At the ECC, healthcare professionals remotely monitor the physiological status of patients using the WSN-based HHE system. The ESPs provide patients and healthcare professionals of the ECC with healthcare …information services. The ESP is developed based on proposed Healthcare Service Middleware (HSM), which integrates the heterogeneous computing and communication devices, and provides the flexible healthcare platform to enrich the healthcare services. Additionally, a Seamless Healthcare Information Delivery (SHID) scheme is proposed to allow healthcare professionals to access patients' with their relevant healthcare data anywhere in real-time without manual manipulations. The ultimate objective of the proposed SPH system is to effectively reduce healthcare labor and to further provide a streamlined, convenient, and low cost healthcare platform for patients and healthcare professionals. Show more

Keywords: E-healthcare system, wireless sensor networks, pervasive computing, seamless handoff, middleware

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 35-49, 2007

Authors: Shen, Jui-Chi | Shih, Dong-Her | Chiang, Hsiu-Sen | Lin, Shih-Bin

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: More and more intra-hospital transport of patients is required to perform special examination or therapy in recent years. The key point of all critical care transport is the continuous monitoring of vital signs. Also, with the growing popularity of wireless technology in the health care area, there is a pressing need to have a proper system in place for patient identification. Errors in patient identification and hence improper administrator of medication can lead to disastrous results. This paper proposes a mobile physiological patient monitoring system, which integrates current mobile smart phone, wireless sensor network, Bluetooth, and RFID patient identification systems …for patient monitoring. This system enables continuous monitoring and patient identification during intra-hospital or inter-hospital patient transport. Show more

Keywords: Wireless sensor network, Motes, physiological monitoring, patient transport, telemedicine system, RFID, patient identification

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 51-68, 2007

Authors: Lin, Ren-Hung | Jan, Jinn-Ke

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: In many-to-many group secure communications, group members may broadcast or receive messages during any session. A fast session key distribution scheme is desirable for handling highly changeable message flows among group members. In this paper, we propose a group keying scheme using tree structures for many-to-many group secure communications. The key storage and computational complexity of the proposed scheme are acceptable and practical for real-life applications. Moreover, once keys are distributed, group members will be able to freely communicate with any member in security with no need of a group controller.

Keywords: Key management, symmetric encryption, pseudo random function, many-to-many group communication

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 69-79, 2007

Authors: Li, Kuan-Ching | Chen, Chiou-Nan | Hsieh, Tsu-Yi | Wen, Chia-Hsien | Lan, Joung-Liang | Chen, Der-Yuan | Tang, Chuan-Yi

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Nailfold capillary microscopy examination has been used since late 1950s as a non-invasive in-vivo technique for diagnosing and monitoring connective tissue disease in adults. Disorders such as Primary Raynaud's phenomenon, progressive systemic sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis were detected in more than 80% of adult patients, by analyzing such high resolution images. Internet computing and grid technologies have changed the way we tackle complex scientific problems. Grid computing environments are characterized by interconnecting a number of heterogeneous resources in geographically distributed domains. They enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. In this paper, we …discuss and develop a framework for nailfold capillary microscope image acquisition and analysis, using computational power provided by grid platforms. In this way, not only useful medical information can be extracted from large amount of history anamneses in an efficient way, with the use of a number of adequate techniques and methods in high performance computing, but also to diagnose abnormal nailfold capillary in far shorter time, to diagnose patient's disease in real-time basis. Based on the results of the classification, analysis of history anamneses are done to discover updated health information possibly hidden in patients' medical records. Show more

Keywords: Nailfold capillary microscopy, medical image, image processing, pattern recognition, grid computing

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 81-89, 2007

Authors: Liu, Chin-De | Chung, Pau-Choo | Chung, Yi-Nung | Thonnat, Monique

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper addresses the issue in scenario-based understanding of human behavior from videos in a nursing care monitoring system. The analysis is carried out based on experiments consisting of single-state scenarios and multi-state scenarios where the former monitors activities under contextual contexts for elementary behavior reasoning, while the latter dictating the elementary behavior order for behavior reasoning, with a priori knowledge in system profile for normality detection. By integrating the activities, situation context, and profile knowledge we can have a better understanding of patients in a monitoring system. In activity recognition, a Negation-Selection mechanism is developed. which employs a divide-and-conquer …concept with the Negation using posture transition to preclude the negative set from the activities. The Selection that follows the Negation uses a moving history trace for activity recognition. Such a history trace composes not only the pose from single frame, but also history trajectory information. As a result, the activity can be more accurately identified. The developed approach has been established into a nursing care monitoring system for elder's daily life behaviors. Results have shown the promise of the approach which can accurately interpret 85% of the regular daily behavior. In addition, the approach is also applied to accident detection which was found to have 90% accuracy with 0% false alarm. Show more

Keywords: Behavior analysis, activity recognition, state machine, scenario recognition

Citation: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 91-103, 2007