Abstract

The fast growth of computer network technologies, like IEEE 802.11x series, Bluetooth, GPRS etc., makes it possible to build computer-assisted surgery (CAS) system in a distributed way, e.g. the wireless connection in operation room, telepresent (surgeons participating in surgery remotely) from anywhere, at anytime. However, the communication overhead of huge image transmission is a big obstacle to the wide deployment of distributed CAS systems, especially in a lowbandwidth wireless network environment. In this paper, we proposed Bitmap-Diff, a novel network bandwidth reduction algorithm which is especially tailored for medical images. The comparison between our algorithm and four other popular bandwidth reduction algorithms, namely zip compression, delta-encoding, fixsized blocking and vary-sized blocking, shows that Bitmap-Diff generates much less transfer bytes, about 35 % less than other algorithms. It is the best communication optimization algorithm for medical image we have ever seen. We believe this will pave the way for the deployment of distributed CAS systems.

Citations