Object-Based Ultrasound Video Processing for Wireless Transmission in Cardiology

The transmission of medical video over wireless channels requires the use of scalable Codecs, with error-resilient and error-concealment functionalities. A fundamental challenge in developing new methods for effective scalable coding of medical video is the careful and meaningful assessment of the coding performance. In this Chapter, we introduce a new, diagnostic approach to help guide the video compression process. A new segmentation method, based on multidimensional Amplitude-Modulation Frequency-Modulation (AM-FM) is introduced for segmenting motion-mode ultrasound video into diagnostically meaningful objects. Rate-distortion curves are provided to provide a measure of video quality-scalability within the framework of object-based coding.