July 4-8, 2011, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
The 16th Opto-Electronics And Communications Conference, OECC 2011
Emerging Heterogeneous Optical Wireless Access Networks for Next Generation Telemedicine and Telehealth Applications Gee-Kung Chang, Joseph Long, Shu-Hao Fan, Cheng Liu, Arshad Chowdhury, Hung-Chang Chien, Sourabh Khire and Nikil Jayant School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 USA
[email protected]
Ahstract- We propose a converged optical wireless access architecture using radio-over-fiber technology to deliver medical data and images independent of data bit rates, formats, and protocols.
We
have
transported
real-time,
uncompressed
telepathology images over 25-km fiber.
I. INTRODUCTION
Aenvisioned for a fully connected society. Information will next-generation
access
network
infrastructure
is
be available to end-users at any time, anywhere, via any wired or wireless medium. Bandwidth requirements of the next generation visual media-intensive Internet access network will grow to multi-gigabits/sec per user in the near future. Various emerging high-speed data, 3D HD video, and HD image applications motivate these expanding access capabilities. However, a single, common service platform, with uniform treatment of network access interface is essential to provide seamless transition between networks and user equipments irrespective of their service types, protocols, formats, or technologies. In this respect, we propose a converged heterogeneous access network architecture as illustrated in Fig. 1 that can enable emerging applications to deliver affordable, high-quality, visual-intensive, electronic data and healthcare services by utilizing telecommunication and multimedia technologies in conjunction with cloud computing solutions tailored to healthcare enterprise environments. A networking gateway platform is required for implementing next generation heterogeneous access networks. The integrated network interface can provide very high throughput, ultra low-latency connectivity for HD-video and Urban
HD images across various data service modalities to facilitate real-time and near real-time communication of elastic data and video information. Such applications include high definition quality video-centric and super high-resolution image-intensive remote diagnosis applications. Real-time delivery of multimedia content is necessary to increase user reach by extending data and video services to the users in the rural areas, to facilitate access to specialty care in metropolitan areas with shortage of specialists, to request second opinion from remotely located medical experts, to support remote health monitoring, and to facilitate remote healthcare education [ 1]-[5]. An architecture containing a gateway platform such as that shown in Fig. 2 can provide transparent connectivity among various telehealth modalities which are located in many healthcare enterprise facilities such as hospitals, diagnostic centers, medical schools, health plan providers, clinics, home care settings, and mobile/emergency care units. Some entities may directly use the public network provider wireless services such as 3G/4GILTE mobile, or optical passive optical network (PON) based broadband networks. In another example, networks dedicated private enterprise network resources as well as public networks may comprise the underlying communication means [6][7]. As illustrated in Fig. 2, it is important that healthcare entities support protocol independent, multi-service, multi-carrier broadband network infrastructure through the gateway platform to allow open access connectivity within or across the healthcare facilities. The unified architecture can provide high-speed broadband connectivity directly through optical fiber communication or through remote antenna units for mobile and portable devices using wireless-over-fiber technology. The core of the architecture is R ural Area
Urban Area
Fig. I. Converged optical and wireless access networksarchitecture for heterogeneous telehealth modalities.
Net�or.k}ielYices
Hospital Facility
2
July 4-8, 2011, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
The 16th Opto-Electronics And Communications Conference, OECC 2011
RAU
LTE GSM, Des,
Mobile nurse station (V\liFi)
3G UMTS WLAN (WiFi, WiMAX)
Portable X-ray Public Safety
-
TDMMlDM-PON
Future services (5O-GHz mm-wave)
IMGR: Intelligent Modality Gateway Router RAU: Remote Antenna Unit
Fig. 4. Gigabit per second lID Telepathology access on 60-GHz mm-wave RF signal over 25km of optical fiber
Fig, 2, Converged broadband optical and wireless access networks for next generation telehealth applications,
mm-wave RF signal and transmitted over a 25km optical fiber. The optical-wireless signal is received by a 60-GHz Photodiode (PD) and wirelessly transmitted to the receiver. At the receiver end, a 60-GHz silicon CMOS radio receiver is used to recover the uncompressed HD image. The HD image is then displayed on an HDTV. The high quality image displayed on the HD screen has undergone no loss of quality or integrity. Such fidelity of medical imaging is integral to effective evaluation and diagnosis in the healthcare arena. In summary, a heterogeneous access network architecture has been designed and developed to provide next generation telehealth services using existing and future converged optical and wireless access system technologies. Intelligent multimedia medical content capture, processing, analysis, and visualization have been explored for telepathology applications. Such applications require high resolution, high volume radiological and pathological images to be delivered in real-time for promoting interactive patient care and reach. This converged network is designed to incorporate a reliable and elastic network layer with system survivability. It will aid to identifY and establish state and local governmental policy and social awareness for the use of sensitive electronic health record (ERR) and medical images. We believe this will be a promising network platform to provide broadband access for patients, doctors, and healthcare workers with equal and reliable system accessibility, affordability and agility.
RAU
([)
Single-mode optical Fiber
Wireless �
HO Camera
High resolution
(HR)
pathological image transmitter Transmitter modality
Receiver modality
Fig. 3. Telepathology system leveraging 60-GHz mm-wave RF signal over optical fiber technology.
the Intelligent Modality Gateway Router (IMGR). The IMGR will serve as the head-end router to provide signal processing and distribution for protocol-independent, multi-band wireless signal upconversion/downconversion, media conversions, local buffering and storage, and security functionality. An integrated optical-wireless network architecture for next generation Telehealth communication systems is proposed to support the communication of protocol-independent, high resolution uncompressed medical images and real-time uncompressed HD video. A proof-of-concept experimental setup is illustrated in Fig. 3. Such an optical wireless network using 60-GHz mm-wave radio-over- fiber technology may be leveraged to support telepathology applications requiring transmission of high-resolution digital images with huge file sizes. For example, a single Whole Slide Image (WSI) of a 20mm x 15mm region of a glass slide sampled at 0.25 microns/pixel, and 24 bits/pixel (8 bpp/ color channel) can easily occupy in excess of 15GB in file size. If multiple focal planes (Z-stack images) are acquired the resultant file size can be in the order of several hundred Gigabytes to Terabytes. A demonstration of the proof of concept wireless over fiber system is shown in Fig. 4. A unidirectional real-time uncompressed HD video link is established between two Telehealth modalities located in two research laboratories that are connected via Georgia Institute of Technology's on-campus optical fiber networks. An uncompressed high-resolution digital pathology image of 25GB is stored and transmitted from a Canon HD Camera. The 1080p video output stream from the Cannon HD camera is optically up-converted to 60-GHz
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