Priority Medical Image Delivery Services over DTN on Disaster Situation

Muhammad Ashar ( 1361019 )


There are many active volcanic mountains in the world and they suddenly erupt and cause a lot of economical and human damages. As the global population is predicted to reach 7 billion by 2012, land pressures and rapid population growth are resulting in more people living within danger zones of volcano area. For example, Mount Merapi erupts periodically. It is one of the most active volcanoes in the world and the most active among 129 volcanoes in Indonesia. Merapi exhumes ash and steam throughout the year. It gives big damages to rural roads and telecommunication network as well as human's health (eye injury by ash contains varying proportion of free crystalline silica).The healthcare worker is expected to build coordination between the parties involved in the emergency response for Merapi eruption to avoid serious health problem. We presents the medical mobile network to transfer medical image data, targeting eye injuries caused by volcano disaster. We propose a priority medical image delivery service, which optimizes the delivery of victim image data from a disaster area to specialist doctors in city hospitals using the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN). DTN is a promising technology used for transmitting data on unstable wireless network. However, transmitting a high-resolution medical image over DTN is a challenging task because the file size is large. Our medical image delivery service assumes to be used for an emergency response to provide quick feedback to healthcare workers after images are received by a hospital. By analyzing the received images, specialist doctors in the city hospital can identify the seriousness of an injury to a victim's eye. To reduce image delivery delay of DTN, we introduce a priority data forwarding method based on an image processing technique. In our system, eye images captured during an emergency situation are automatically divided into some pieces. Each piece is manually assigned a priority based on its content (e.g., based on the severity of the injury) by healthcare workers. These data are transmitted over DTN where some Android smartphones with Wi-Fi Direct relay the data. With prioritized medical image delivery service, we found that the message delivery rate at the hospital can be improved by up to 20% comparing with the case without the priority forwarding mechanism when we use epidemic routing.