title: Clinical validation of different echocardiographic motion pictures expert group-4 algorythms and compression levels for telemedicine.
abstract: Tele-echocardiography is not widely used because of lengthy transmission times when using standard Motion Pictures Expert Groups (MPEG)-2 lossy compression algorythms, unless expensive high bandwidth lines are used. We sought to validate the newer MPEG-4 algorythms to allow further reduction in echocardiographic motion video file size. Four cardiologists expert in echocardiography read blindly 165 randomized uncompressed and compressed 2D and color Doppler normal and pathologic motion images. One Digital Video and 3 MPEG-4 compression algorythms were tested, the latter at 3 decreasing compression quality levels (100%, 65% and 40%). Mean diagnostic and image quality scores were computed for each file and compared across the 3 compression levels using uncompressed files as controls. File dimensions decreased from a range of uncompressed 12-83 MB to MPEG-4 0.03-2.3 MB. All algorythms showed mean scores that were not significantly different from uncompressed source, except the MPEG-4 DivX algorythm at the highest selected compression (40%, p=.002). These data support the use of MPEG-4 compression to reduce echocardiographic motion image size for transmission purposes, allowing cost reduction through use of low bandwidth lines.
authors.affiliation: Centro Cardiologico Fondazion "Monzino", IRCCS, Milano, Italy. pbar@iol.it
authors.forename: Paolo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Barbier
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Alimento
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Berna
authors.forename: Dario
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cavoretto
authors.forename: Fabrizio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Celeste
authors.forename: Manuela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Muratori
authors.forename: Maurizio D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Guazzi
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002309:Cardiology; D044962:Data Compression; D004452:Echocardiography; D006801:Humans; D009040:Motion Pictures; D015588:Observer Variation; D017216:Telemedicine