Institute of Information Engineering, Feng Chia University

To provide the function of telemedicine, doctors need to use the media of public or private network to exchange expert information as needed and make correct diagnosis no matter where they are. In addition, patient's medical data including images must be accessible from remote areas away from the PACS systems in the local hospital. The sharing of doctor's diagnostic experience and precious medical facilities between the hospitals can lower the medical cost and provide better services.

Because the medical images data occupy a large amount of storage space in a PACS system and put a heavy loading on the network for transmitting image data, we propose a cost effective system in this thesis. Based on the hospital computer and dial-up connection, we use dynamic discrete cosine transformation and progressive reduced-difference pyramid coding in our system. Although the transmission rate of dial-up system is slower than the LAN, with the use of adaptive data compression doctors can look up patient's medical information on-line in their houses or in remote clinics. Telemedicine really reduces the medical cost and increases the sharing of resources.