Providing health care services in
rural areas has shown to be a challenging task. Low concentration of
population makes health care institutions not self-sustainable so typically
only small ambulances with general practitioners are available in rural
areas. In such situation, one of the biggest problems is lack of medical
specialists.
Significant improvement in providing health care services in mentioned areas
can be achieved by use of electronic means of communication. Rapid Internet
development in recent years has made possible new medical applications
including telemedicine. Telemedicine helps connect rural areas to large
medical centers through exchange of medical information between distant
locations.
The Virtual Polyclinic, a web-based system provides tools to exchange
medical information between general practitioners in rural areas and
specialists in large medical centers.
Analysis of cardiac ultrasound images is an important tool for diagnosis of cardiac diseases. The hypothesis of the research project is that Doppler ultrasound images of aortic outflow velocity profiles have different features for healthy and diseased cases. The goal of the project is to develop a signal and image analysis methodology to extract relevant structures and features from DICOM Doppler ultrasound images to be used for statistical analysis of aortic outflow profiles for a larger number of patients.