Smart cloud system with image processing server in diagnosing brain diseases dedicated for hospitals with limited resources

Technol Health Care. 2017;25(3):607-610. doi: 10.3233/THC-171298.

Abstract

The use of medical imaging in diagnosing brain disease is growing. The challenges are related to the big size of data and complexity of the image processing. High standard of hardware and software are demanded, which can only be provided in big hospitals. Our purpose was to provide a smart cloud system to help diagnosing brain diseases for hospital with limited infrastructure. The expertise of neurologists was first implanted in cloud server to conduct an automatic diagnosis in real time using image processing technique developed based on ITK library and web service. Users upload images through website and the result, in this case the size of tumor was sent back immediately. A specific image compression technique was developed for this purpose. The smart cloud system was able to measure the area and location of tumors, with average size of 19.91 ± 2.38 cm2 and an average response time 7.0 ± 0.3 s. The capability of the server decreased when multiple clients accessed the system simultaneously: 14 ± 0 s (5 parallel clients) and 27 ± 0.2 s (10 parallel clients). The cloud system was successfully developed to process and analyze medical images for diagnosing brain diseases in this case for tumor.

Keywords: Cloud system; ITK; brain diseases; medical image; web services.

MeSH terms

  • Brain Diseases / diagnosis
  • Brain Diseases / diagnostic imaging*
  • Brain Neoplasms / diagnosis
  • Brain Neoplasms / diagnostic imaging
  • Cloud Computing*
  • Equipment and Supplies, Hospital
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted* / methods
  • Neuroimaging / methods