A multimedia telemedicine system.

A multimedia telemedicine system (MTS) using Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) over the Internet is developed. Doctor with patient and doctor can communicate each other using this system. Real-time data, including audio, video and instant message (IM), and non-real-time data, including vital sign signals, radiological images with DICOM 3.0, file, bio-signal, bio-data and so on, can be exchanged on the system. This system's architecture is client/server mode. All data are encoded/compressed before transferring through Internet/Intranet. The real-time audio is encoded and decoded by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) audio layer 3 algorithm and real-time video is encoded and decoded by MPEG-4. The software implementation of needed functionality without any externally attached hardware CODEC (Coder/Decoder) units enables the compact design with low cost. The real-time video has 25 frames per second at Local Area Network (LAN) and more than 20 frames per second at ADSL.