Development of a web-based telemedicien system for remote ENT diagnoses

This paper presents an asynchronous web-based ear-nose-throat (ENT) diagnosis system to carry out location independent diagnoses. The proposed diagnosis model provides a medical service process for patients who may ask for diagnosis at a distance location instead of going to hospitals directly. Based on the web-based ENT diagnosis system, patients are able to submit their physiological signals and multimedia data to the virtual hospital server through the internet. Meanwhile, ENT physicians may process the diagnoses through the internet via accessing the data and files in the virtual hospital server. Especially, the quality of multimedia data transmissions can be guaranteed by using an asynchronous communication mechanism. Tentative diagnostic reports are used to suggest the requested patients for further face-to-face diagnoses at appropriate clinics, local hospitals, general hospitals, or medical centers. Therefore, the nation's medical resources can be well arranged. As a consequence, a system prototype with self-modified hardware devices and software components had been implemented in our laboratory. Finally, several experimental results are demonstrated to verify our approaches.