Telemedicine over High-speed Internet: Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) Project - 16 November 2005
D. Lomanto
The role of communication technology today is very important in education, healthcare and related activities. But due to several difficulties as high usage cost, needs of multiple expensive ISDN lines, expensive broadcasting equipments, software for CODEC, etc., the use of telemedicine has never been widely accepted and utilized as it needs.
Telemedicine can be utilized to beam radiology (CT-scan, MRI) or vital signs (blood pressure, ECG) but with some limits as still pictures, images and live video needs software for compression-decompression (CODEC) devices that affect the quality of the images and amplify the delay between audio and video. The existing technology utilizes bandwidth of 128 Kb per ISDN line and usually 3 lines are utilized with a total of 384 Kb. Even with the availability of ADSL technology for broadcasting we have the necessity to use CODEC software to transmit images and video. Due to all these factors, the key factors for a successful telemedicine/telesurgery activities is to have: high-quality of images, video and audio; high-speed connectivity, little time-delay and multi-channel broadband. For this a needs to create a faster and bigger network than the actual network worldwide utilized.
In our project we would like to broadcast high-quality of live images and/or video with high frame rate and a very short time delay in Audio/Video signals. At this purpose we will utilize the DVTS technology (Digital Video Transfer System) to broadcast live-telemedicine/telesurgery using high-speed bandwidth of at least 35 Mps. This will allow us to utilize non-compressed images for broadcasting, keeping high quality and due to the high frame rate of the video signal.
The APAN is an active organization working for an active collaboration among countries with big broadband network (at least 1 Gbps) like Japan (APAN-JP), Korea (KARN), Singapore (NUS- Singarean), EU and USA (Internet 2). The project will go through different stages to involve as much as more Asian Countries. After an initial setup project started in August 2005, a successfull linkup, beaming live surgery, has been realized in October between our Centre (MISC) in Singapore (NUS) and Japan (University of Kyushu) and South Korea (University of Seoul in Bandung). The subsequent step has been to connect a fourth country (Australia) and on November 16 a live surgery transmission was done between Singapore, Kyushu, Seould and Adelaide (Australia). After these successful experience we would like to involve and connect many different asia-pacific countries among them and then also EU countries and USA.
This project on “Medicine over Internet” will certainly improve exchanges in the medical communications among different Asia-Pacific Countries in spite of their location, political boundaries and expertise. The medical knowledge will be a platform for case-discussion, proctoring and mentoring in the asia-pacific area. The difference in medical care level and medical social system varied all over Asia because of disparity in economic power and differences in policies, religions and customs. The development of broadband together with the use of DTVS will allow us to spread out medical information with Internet beyond the border. Exchange and confrontation will be easier, cheaper and easily available.
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