Abstract:

Although firstly applied in the early age of telephone and radio waves, telemedicine was reawakened in its new form in the last decade of the twentieth century, beginning with the massive use of telecommunications and computer technology in medicine. In addition to the transfer and exchange of data (mostly pictures and clips), system for telemedicine expanded through various accessories for signal processing. In this article we evaluated the factors influencing the quality of transmitted video signals by modern communications network. In this the most important is the effect of coding bit rate and data loss in the network, which joint impact is analyzed by software simulations for final consideration of the practical performance of the compressed digital images transfer. Related to this is verified the inaccuracy of common expectation that increasing the bit rate of the coders contributes to the improvement of image quality, because it is strictly true only for communication channels with no losses, while the quality in real life systems this function is not always increasing when the video packets are subject to losses, so there is an optimum value of the coding bit rate, which maintains the quality of received video at a satisfactory level.

Keywords:

Telemedicine, computer technology, compressed digital images transfer, modern communications network.