A collaborative and mobile platform for medical image analysis: A preliminary study

Abstract

The tremendous advancement in mobile computing hardware and software changes everything in people including health care. Image review on computer-based workstations has made film-based review outdated. However, with the expansion of needs in portability of digital workstations, we wish a acceptable quality of medical image reviewing in a handled device, which could give radiologists more convenience. In this context, mobile health (m-Health) delivers health care services, overcoming geographical, temporal, and even organizational barriers. This paper presents a collaborative and mobile platform for image analysis which provides medical images shared so that the radiologists can review these data anytime and anywhere. In addition, this platform has the biggest differences with other popular or traditional systems that it supports collaboration and plug-in. It means that all the experts in the different locations can have a research together like in the same conference face to face and programmers can develop their favorite functions as they will. At last, the system also supplies many indispensable medical image analysis auxiliary functions such as image registration and image segmentation, both of which offer radiologists greatly exact diagnosis tools. We evaluated the platform with respect to expert satisfaction, functional characteristics. The experimental results show that our platform outperforms conventional image review systems in these regards.