KR0155803B1 - Remote medical diagnostic system - Google Patents

Abstract

The present invention relates to a remote medical diagnosis system, wherein a transmitting means for transmitting a transmitting device having imaging or radiation equipment includes a scanning unit, an image converting unit, a region of interest display unit, a compression unit, and a transmitting unit, and a receiving unit for a remote place having a radiologist Is composed of an automatic receiving and filing unit, a restoration unit, a display unit and an image processing unit. Therefore, compression can be performed by a compression method selected according to the type of image to be transmitted to the remote site or the urgency of patient diagnosis, and the automatic reception and filing function of the remote location facilitates the transmission and reception of the image as well as the reception of the remote doctor. The image files can be selected and diagnosed one by one, and the transmitted images can be automatically received and stored even if the doctor is currently doing other work on the computer.

Description

Remote medical diagnosis system

1 is a block diagram showing a conventional remote medical diagnosis system.

2 is a block diagram showing a remote medical diagnosis system according to the present invention.

FIG. 3 is a flowchart for describing an operation of the ROI display unit illustrated in FIG. 2.

4 is a view for explaining an outline of a compression method based on a region of interest in the compression unit shown in FIG.

5 is an embodiment of the remote medical diagnosis system shown in FIG.

* Explanation of symbols for main parts of the drawings

21: image scanning unit 22: image conversion unit

23: region of interest display unit 24: compression unit

25: transmission unit 26: automatic receiving and filing unit

27: restoring unit 28: display unit

29: image processing unit

The present invention relates to a teleradiology system, and more particularly to a medical diagnostic system for diagnosing a medical image at a remote location.

To date, radiotherapy has been done by viewing medical images of patients on film. Therefore, in order to receive a doctor's diagnosis, the radiologist had to be where the medical image of the patient was obtained. If you do not have a doctor, you will need to store the film for later use or carry the film yourself to show it to a doctor elsewhere. In other words, diagnosing a medical image with a film is limited in space and time, and thus affects a rapid diagnosis of a patient.

However, in recent years, laser scanners capable of digitizing medical equipment and films introduced with computers have been developed so that medical images of patients can be stored in computers. Digitalized medical images can be easily stored, viewed, handled and transmitted.

The remote medical diagnosis system is a medical service equipment that transmits such digitalized medical images from a transmission site to a remote location by using a computer and a communication network so that a radiologist or a related doctor can be treated at a long distance. The most common transmission site is a hospital. The remote site is the doctor's home or office.

When a patient or trauma victim is taken to a hospital, the patient receives one or more medical treatments. Current medical treatments include Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) or Computed Tomography (CT) scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Nuclear Medicine Imaging (NMI), ultrasound and X-rays. Depending on the schedule, workload, emergency, budgetary pressure, etc., the radiologist may not be in the hospital at any given time to read the medical image. Using a remote medical diagnosis system, radiologists can expand their area of responsibility by viewing medical images transmitted from remote locations. Medical imaging was most frequently transmitted over standard telephone lines, but with the advent of cellular telephones, digital cellular radios, fiber optics and satellite communications, transmission media are no longer limited to standard telephone lines.

In practice, imaging or radiographic equipment scans the traumatized tissue, and the resulting raw digital data is converted into video signals and displayed on a connected monitor or display device. Most imaging or radiographic equipment is used to store raw data, which compresses the raw data before storing it. The most common storage devices are magnetic disk drives (either 8 inches, 5.25 inches, 3.5 inches), tape drives or optical disk drives, magneto-optical disk drives, etc., which are used for recording.

Radiation tomography scans of one particular area of the patient's body are called 'slices', and slices are typically 5 mm apart. Gathering slices is called a study, which typically contains 20 to 40 slices.

A data matrix is used to describe each slice, with the most common data matrix consisting of 512 x 512 valid data points. However, the size of the matrix is variable. For example, Elscint CT scan model No. The 1800 allows the operator to choose from three different matrix sizes: 256 × 256, 340 × 340 and 512 × 512. Each point in the matrix may have a concentration value, which represents the concentration of the substance found at a particular point in the slice.

Most CT scanners use the Houndsfield scale to assign values for each concentration value. The Houndsfield scale ranges from minus 1000 to 3095, with air assigned at minus 1000, water at zero, and bone at concentrations above 200.

When viewing a slice, the radiologist does not see the full range of the Houndsfield scale, but rather specifies the window before the slice is displayed. A window is a narrowing filter, which can sometimes correspond to 98% of the raw data. Tissue windows are defined to check for internal bleeding, and bone windows are defined to check for fractures.

For example, if soft tissue is of particular interest, the radiologist defines a window from zero to 100. Any concentration values below zero in this example appear black on the CRT screen and any concentration values above 100 appear white. Concentration values within the defined range appear in shades of gray.

Typically, telemedicine diagnostic systems use the hardware and software to transfer video data from imaging or radiation equipment to remote display devices. In the conventional remote medical diagnosis system shown in FIG. 1, the image acquisition unit 1 of a transmission site of a hospital or the like obtains a desired medical image from a medical image film generated by an image or radiation equipment, and then compresses a lossy compression unit 2. After loss compression such as discrete cosine transform is performed in the transmission unit, the transmission unit 3 transmits to the remote site where the radiologist is through a transmission modem or the like.

On the other hand, the remote receiving unit 4 receives the compressed medical image transmitted through a reception modem or the like, and restores the medical image before compression by the restoration unit 5 and displays it on an arbitrary display unit 6. Have the radiologist review the medical image.

However, in the conventional remote medical diagnosis system, since the compression ratio of the medical image to be transmitted to the remote location is reduced to about 20: 1, the transmission time of the medical image can be reduced, but the image restored from the remote location is more Image quality may deteriorate and radiologists or related physicians may make mistakes in diagnosis.

In addition, when the window is set, the machined characteristic due to the lossy compression appears, making diagnosis difficult. For example, cracked portions of bone can be easily found by lossy compression and restoration, but delicate areas such as small tumors are not easily found.

In addition, when transmitting a medical image through a modem or the like, there is a problem that transmission is impossible when the doctor is not waiting at a remote location. In addition, since only the medical image is transmitted, information related to the patient or the image has to be transmitted separately through another communication medium.

Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to compress the medical image by a compression method selected from the loss compression method, lossless compression method and the compression method based on the region of interest according to the type of medical image obtained and the urgency of diagnosis to solve the above problems. The present invention provides a remote medical diagnosis system for transmitting to a remote site.

It is another object of the present invention to provide a remote medical diagnosis system for automatically receiving a transmitted image even when a remote doctor is absent by performing an automatic reception at a receiving end of a remote place.

Still another object of the present invention is to provide a remote medical diagnosis system for assisting the diagnosis of a doctor by transmitting not only medical image data but also patient information, image acquisition information, film information, and image information from a transmission site to a remote location.

In order to achieve the above object, the remote medical diagnosis system according to the present invention comprises a scanning unit for generating a digital image by scanning a medical image film obtained by the radiation equipment at the transmission site; An image conversion unit for converting the digital image generated by the scanning unit into a transmission standard format; A compression unit for compressing the converted image by a predetermined compression method selected according to the type of the image converted by the image conversion unit into a transmission standard format; A transmission unit for transmitting the image compressed by the compression unit to a remote location; An automatic receiving and filing unit for automatically receiving and filing an image transmitted from the transmission destination; A restoration unit for restoring the image file stored in the automatic reception and filing unit; And a display unit for displaying the image restored by the restoration unit.

In order to achieve the above object, the remote medical diagnosis system according to the present invention comprises a scanning unit for generating a digital image by scanning a medical image film obtained by the radiation equipment at the transmission site; An image conversion unit for converting the digital image generated by the scanning unit into a transmission format; A region of interest display unit for displaying a region of interest with respect to an image converted by the image converter into a transmission standard format; A compression unit for compressing a region of interest of the image displayed on the region of interest display by lossless compression and an uninterested region by lossy compression; A transmission unit for transmitting the image compressed by the compression unit to a remote location; An automatic receiving and filing unit for automatically receiving and filing an image transmitted from the transmission destination; A restoration unit for restoring the image file stored in the automatic reception and filing unit; And a display unit for displaying the image restored by the restoration unit.

Hereinafter, the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings.

2 is a block diagram showing a remote medical diagnosis system according to the present invention.

The remote medical diagnosis system shown in FIG. 2 includes a scanning unit 21 for generating a digital image by scanning a medical image film obtained by radiation equipment from a transmission site, and transmitting the digital image generated by the scanning unit 21. The image converting unit 22 for converting to the standard format, the region of interest display 23 for displaying the region of interest for the image converted into the transmission standard format by the image converting unit 22, and the region of interest display 23 The region of interest of the image is lossless compression, and the uninterested region is a compression unit 24 which compresses by a lossy compression method, a transmission unit 25 which transmits the image compressed by the compression unit 24 to a remote place, and Automatic reception and filing unit 26 for automatically receiving and filing an image, Restoration unit 27 for restoring an image file stored in the automatic reception and filing unit 26, and an image restored in the restoration unit 27 Display unit 28 to display, and The image processor 29 is configured to perform a predetermined process on a desired image to assist the doctor in diagnosing the image displayed on the display unit 28. Here, the compression unit 24 is composed of a switch 24a, a lossy compression unit 24b, a lossless compression unit 24c, and a compression unit 24d based on the region of interest.

Here, the image conversion unit 22, the ROI 23 and the compression unit 24 are implemented by a personal computer having a high resolution monitor, and the automatic receiving and filing unit 26, the restoration unit 27, and the image processing unit. 29 is implemented by a personal computer having a high resolution monitor.

Next, the operation of the present invention will be described with reference to FIGS. 2 to 5.

Referring to FIG. 2, the image scanning unit 21 scans a medical image film and generates a digital image.

The image converting unit 22 converts the image scanned by the image scanning unit 21 into DICOM (Digital Image COmmunication in Medicine) form in order to follow the standardized image format recommended by ACR / NEMA. At this time, patient information such as name, age and gender, image acquisition information such as mother dollar, photographing site, film information such as film size, image information such as the number of horizontal pixels, the number of vertical pixels, the number of bits per pixel, etc. Make a DICOM file and send it together.

The region of interest display 23 displays the region of interest by using a mouse or a pen before compressing the image converted by the image converter 22. The display method of this region of interest is described below with reference to FIG.

First, vertices are displayed around the region of interest in the medical image using a mouse or a pen (step 31), and then the vertices are connected by lines (step 32). In step 32, the line connection determines the current vertex and the next vertex in chronological order. A polygon is formed by connecting the last drawn vertex with the first drawn vertex. The inside of the polygon is filled using a seed fill algorithm (step 33). This filled polygon corresponds to the region of interest.

The compression unit 24 compresses the medical image output from the ROI display unit 23. The compression method used here includes lossy compression, lossless compression, and compression based on the ROI. The concept of the compression method based on the region of interest is described with reference to FIG. 4 as follows.

In FIG. 4, when the image 4a of the chest region is given, the hatched portion 4b is a lung corresponding to a region of interest (ROI), and the other region 4c is Non Region Of Interest (NROI). In the compression method based on the region of interest, lossless compression is performed on the region of interest 4b, and lossy compression is performed on the uninterested region 4c. Therefore, the compression ratio can be increased for the entire image without deteriorating the image quality of the important portion.

The image compressed by the compression unit 24 is transmitted to the remote receiving unit through the transmission unit 25. The transmitted image is automatically received and filed by the automatic receiving and filing unit 26 without informing the transmitting unit 25 of the reception preparation. This can be implemented with multitasking on a remote computer.

The decompressor 27 restores the image selected by the doctor from among the received images to the image before compression. The reconstruction of the image is performed in the reverse process of compression according to the compression method of the transmitted image.

The display unit 28 displays an image restored by the restoration unit 27, and a monitor or the like is used as an example.

The image processor 29 performs a predetermined process on the image displayed on the display unit 28 in order for the doctor to look in more detail. As an image processing type, window / level and magnifying glass are used. ), Zooming, reversing, horizontal / vertical flipping, and clockwise / counter-clockwise rotation.

The operation of the above-mentioned remote medical diagnosis system will be described in more detail with reference to the embodiment shown in FIG.

The computer 52 of the transmission destination controls the film scanner 51, the display monitor 53 and the transmission modem 54. First, the computer 52 digitizes the medical imaging film through the laser film scanner 51, and then digitally. The image is converted into an analog signal and displayed on the display monitor 53. Looking at the image displayed on the display monitor 53, the technician of the transmission destination displays the region of interest. Before transmitting the image to the remote site, the image is compressed. The compression method includes lossy compression, lossless compression, and a compression method based on the region of interest. To send. In order to transmit the image through the telephone line, the transmission line is set up, the telephone is dialed, and the image is transmitted. Line setting items include transmission speed and parity check.

The remote site includes a reception modem 55, a computer 56, a storage device 57, and a display monitor 58. Even at a remote location, the computer 56 is responsible for controlling peripherals. The image transmitted from the transmission destination through the reception modem 55 is automatically stored in the storage device 57 such as a disk. The image file selected by the radiologist among the stored image files is restored to the image before compression and displayed on the display monitor 58. The radiologist makes a radiation diagnosis while viewing the image displayed on the display monitor 58.

As described above, the remote medical diagnosis system according to the present invention supports compression based on lossy compression, lossless compression, and region of interest, and thus compression can be performed using a compression method selected according to the type of image to be transmitted to a remote site or the urgency of patient diagnosis. There is an advantage.

In addition, the automatic receiving and filing function of the remote receiving unit makes it easy to transmit and receive images, and the remote doctor can select and diagnose received image files one by one, even if the doctor is currently performing other tasks on the computer. There is an advantage that can automatically receive and store the transmitted image.

In addition, since not only the image information but also patient information, image acquisition information, and film information are transmitted together in a single DICOM file, there is an advantage that there is no additional communication medium necessary for diagnosing a patient between a remote site and a transmission site.

Claims (5)

A scanning unit which scans the medical imaging film obtained by the radiation equipment on the transmission site and generates a digital image; In addition to the digital image generated by the scanning unit, at least patient information including the name, age, and gender of the patient, image information including the horizontal, vertical pixels, and bits per pixel, an image including a modality and a photographing site. An image conversion unit for converting film information including acquisition information and film size into a transmission standard format; A region of interest display unit for displaying a region of interest with respect to an image converted by the image converter into a transmission standard format; A compression unit for compressing a region of interest of the image displayed on the region of interest display by lossless compression and an uninterested region by lossy compression; A transmission unit for transmitting the image compressed by the compression unit to a remote location; An automatic receiving and filing unit for automatically receiving and filing an image transmitted from the transmission destination; A restoration unit for restoring the image file stored in the automatic reception and filing unit; And a display unit for displaying the image restored by the restoration unit. The apparatus of claim 1, wherein the remote medical diagnosis system further comprises an image processor configured to perform predetermined processing on a desired image to assist the doctor in diagnosing the image displayed on the display unit, and then display the image on the display unit. Remote medical diagnostic system, characterized in that. The display apparatus of claim 1, wherein the ROI display in the ROI is represented by vertices around the ROI in the image converted by the image converter, and is determined after determining the current vertex and the next vertex in chronological order. A telemedicine diagnosis system comprising: forming a polygon by connecting a vertex drawn later and a vertex drawn first. The remote medical diagnosis system of claim 1, wherein the image conversion unit and the compression unit are implemented by a personal computer having a high resolution monitor. The remote medical diagnosis system according to claim 1, wherein the automatic receiving and filing unit and the restoration unit are implemented by a personal computer having a high resolution monitor.