Design and implementation of a PC-based multimedia biosignal integration system

This paper presents a novel framework to provide the useful models such as Teleconsultation and Telemonitoring for PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). It mainly makes use of multimedia together with network-transferring technologies, etc. to integrate the various departments in the hospital, with the expectation of helping the specialists make consultation and share the resources through the network as well as reducing the management cost; so as to enhance efficiency, improve medical quality and provide the patients with better service. The whole system in this approach is based on the most popular platform of Windows and builds the medical database by PACS database programming. It combines OLE DB interface and ADO technology, etc. to provide the users with operations such as data search and access; and makes use of the network construction; data transfer and message transfer of DirectPlay object throughout the whole system to operate. Besides providing general text communication, the system also provides the video-conferencing to enhance the interaction among people. Finally, in order to benefit the network transfer, the system also provides lossless data compression service to increase data-transferring speed. This paper also proposes the Group Data Provider Selection (GDPS) mechanism, by which the system not only can reduce the system-management workload of the database, but also can find out the best network-transferring path automatically to transfer the data to the destination. Moreover, in the experiment of the Telemonitoring module, under the condition that there are three signal channels for each biosignal extractor and the sampling frequency of each channel is set up at 500Hz, the nursing monitoring station can monitor over 12 biosignal extractors at the same time, which has reached the requirement of a practical PACS used in modern hospital. This also illustrates the effectiveness and the potential of the proposed scheme.