Healthcare-friendly Bluetooth revision is four times faster, still seems slow
By Tim Stevens 
posted Nov 3rd 2009 8:48AM
posted Nov 3rd 2009 8:48AM
Bluetooth may be good for rocking tunes or dropping calls, but transmitting high-res medical imagery seems like something of a stretch. Nevertheless, that's what a team at the PSG College of Technology Peelamedu in India has worked upUpdate: As many commenters have pointed out, PACS is an existing infrastructure for storing and sharing medical imagery. This is an extension of that system to allow Bluetoothy communication.
I'm going to go ahead and ask the obvious question. Why the hell are they spending money when there are already better solutions?
Spending money on this research is what I meant.....
Probably because the faster solutions use stronger signals, and can interfere with some medical equipment.
PACS has been around longer than Bluetooth. It's a standard system for archiving and retrieving DICON images.
It sounds like these students are shoehorning bluetooth connectivity into a PACS server. Neat, now a doctor can pull up your xrays on his blackberry or iphone and charge you extra for that. This is hardly newsworthy.
I think you mean DICOM images
Yeah, typo. I meant DICOM.
I used to work on medical software that pulled MRI DICOMs out of a PAC server and represented them as volumetric 3D data on consumer-level PCs. It took advantage of 3D hardware with texture compression and my own optimizations to visualize 1024x1024x1024 3D textures at decent frame rates on graphics cards with only 256mb RAM at the time (those were the top of the line then).
Eventually the company went under, but I kept the prototype source that I wrote as a contractor, but I since left medical to work in the simulation/gaming industry.
That said, polling over a thousand 1024x1024 slices out of a PACS server over a Bluetooth connection would be ungodly SLOOOOWWWW... best to leave that to X-rays and single MRI/CT slices.
PACS is a generic name for a Hospital image data base and not a product name as suggested.
However agreed, 120 for an single image is not much use, especially if you consider the average CAT scan is about 1GB of data.
I've worked in a variety of healthcare environments. Ditch this for another wireless technology. Two minutes for a 1.5meg image? Not useful, in the slightest. At a range of 6-10 feet (Let's be real about Bluetooth's range)? Really useless.
Work to get an 802.11 standard ratified in the hospitals. Some hospitals already have this technology in use.
The bluetooth spec isn't "dubbed PACS". PACS systems are for storing and viewing medical images. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_archiving_and_communication_system . Also, the article after the read link says this is for telemedicine, an important model in India for rural care. This seems to be for working in the absence of a reliable mobile network or internet access.
I work in the industry. No way this will fly anywhere else. Doctors are demanding jerks, 802.11n is not really fast enough for this kind of stuff.
LOL...so true.
I agree with the speed issue. We are required to use gigabit ethernet for everything to make it as fast as possible. Wireless (unless it is gigabit) will never fly for this type of technology. We deal with massive amounts of data.
CT set with 4000 images is about 2GB....
A busy hospital like ours, stores a major fraction of a petabyte of images online at any given time. Over bluetooth? Really? I'm not sure what telemedicine over a distance of meters means. To us, telemedicine is that in the middle of the night our emergency films are sent halfway around the world to be read by NightHawk, not within bluetooth range...
That's funny, no Radiologist will wait 120 sec for a 1.5 meg image. 120 sec is almost too long for a complete study, after 15 sec on one image they will rage out and start screaming at someone.
There has to be a typo in this article. I think they mean 1.5*GB* not MB. Otherwise, yes, this is a complete waste of time.