SP-MIOV: A novel framework of shadow proxy based medical image online visualization in computing and storage resource restrained environments

摘要

The rapid development of Internet and various mobile communication media initiate the demands for access to medical image visualization systems. Medical image reading and interpretation at any time, any place and any device become an urgent need for radiologists. The current medical image online visualization methods have disadvantages in computing and storage resource restrained environments. This study presents a novel framework of medical image online visualization based on shadow proxy, which makes applications have across platform ability and universal environmental adaptability especial for devices with restricted running resources. The framework can be adapted in multiple client architectures including the pure web applications, mobile applications or regular desktop applications. It is easy to be integrated into third party software and there are no restrictions of the communication protocols between the client and server side due to two innovations of the framework that are shadow proxy mechanism and shadow data. The shadow proxy just does lightweight tasks on shadow data and the ultimate processing of computing tasks are moved to the server side to complete. The size of shadow data is small enough for shadow proxy that speeds up local display and processing tasks. Finally, the framework takes advantage of high performance on server side to render high quality image results. The performance of proposed work is evaluated in a web based medical image visualization system, and the results show that the framework in this paper allows the system to have smooth and quasi-real-time interaction performance. Therefore, this study ensures the local client operations fluency and fast while the quality of the visualization is still not lost that gives the best user experience.