u-KoMIPS: A Medical Image Processing System in a Ubiquitous Environment

The ubiquitous computing paradigm has made the telemedicine field being changed. However, research on the telemedicine field in a ubiquitous environment has not been carried out yet. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a ubiquitous medical image processing system for telemedicine applications based on the time-triggered message-triggered object (TMO) structuring scheme that is a distributed real-time object model. The initial version of our system is named KoMIPS (Konkuk Medical Image Processing System) that is a result of joint work with a Samsung Medical Center team. KoMIPS is a stand-alone system. Currently, KoMIPS is being extended to run on a ubiquitous environment. The extended version, named u-KoMIPS (ubiquitous KoMIPS), is designed with the TMO model and its execution environment is based on TMOSM/Linux that is an execution engine for a TMO structured program on Linux. The u-KoMIPS can acquire a medical image from various medical image scanners (e.g., MRI, CT, gamma camera, etc.) and then convert it into a DICOM image, transfer the DICOM image to one or more clients. Then, a client can analyze, process, and diagnose the DICOM image. We expect that telemedicine applications based on our system would accurately acquire a medical image from various medical image devices and efficiently analyze it.