Telemedicine with Digital Video Transport System over the Korea-Japan Cable Network

Aim: Transmission of high quality moving-image is essential for telemedicine, which needs standardization of medical techniques and healthcare beyond geographical borders. The aim of this study is to establish a broad-banded medical network between hospitals in Korea and Japan using Digital Video Transport System (DVTS) over Internet protocol. Method: We used Asia Pacific Internet Infrastructure(APII) and Kyushu GigaPOP (QGPOP) (Japanese side), the Korea Advanced Research Network (Korean side), and the Korea-Japan Cable Network (international line). We performed Korea-Japan medical teleconferences with bi-directional transmission by DVTS streaming on IPv4 network. Results: The teleconference and surgical video transmission with DVTS over Internet protocol was successfully performed. We could keep enough bandwidth of 30 Mbps for a line of transmission. The quality of the transmitted moving image had no frame loss with the rate of 30 per second. The sound was also clear and the time delay was less than 0.01 sec. Conclusion: We have established an international medical network with high-quality video transmission over Internet protocol, which is easy to perform, reliable, and also economical. This will be a promising tool in remote medicine for the two countries and for worldwide telemedical communication in the future.