Priority medical image delivery using DTN for healthcare workers in volcanic emergency

In this paper, targeting eye injuries caused by volcano disaster, we propose a medical image delivery service that streamlines the delivery of victim image data from a disaster area to specialist doctors in city hospitals using the Delay Tolerant Network (DTN). The service is used for an emergency response to provide quick feedback to healthcare workers after images are received by a hospital. With the received images, specialist doctors diagnose the type and seriousness of the eye injury in those images and provide appropriate medical instructions to healthcare workers. To reduce image delivery delay, it is desirable to send medical images to doctors based on image priority. For this purpose, we propose an image prioritization method in which an image is divided into pieces, and each piece is assigned a priority based on its content (for example, the severity of the injury), aiming to deliver high-priority pieces faster. Based on the priorities assigned to the pieces, we propose a message priority forwarding scheme for pieces in a DTN environment, where higher priority pieces are assigned more bandwidth and transmitted with higher resolution. Also, taking into account actual practice in a disaster area, we design and implement an application for Android devices. Through computer simulations supposing a volcano disaster scenario involving Mount Merapi in Indonesia, we confirmed that the proposed delivery service significantly shortens the image delivery time.