Teleconsultation Enhanced via Session Retrieval Capabilities: Smart Playback Functions and Recovery Mechanism

With the widespread deployment of the Internet nowadays and the increasing power and sophistication of network communication technologies, many collaborative systems have been proposed to support users in geographically dispersed areas in transmitting and sharing multimedia data (Huang et al., 2007; Li et al., 2004; Marsh et al., 2006). One area in which collaborative systems have found particular use is that of telemedicine and teleconsultation, and it is now common practice for physicians to use such systems as a means of analyzing medical images, discussing patients’ symptoms, consulting with other medical experts, and so forth (Vazquez et al., 2007; Lee et al., 2004; Lo et al., 2000; Shah et al., 1997; Paul et al., 1998; Guerri et al., 2003; Kholief et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2001). By fully exploiting real-time videoconferencing and medical information sharing, conventional medical teleconsultation systems may satisfy the requirement of providing the interactive discussion environment, but lack session retrieval capabilities that are addressed in terms of session-replay and session-recovery in this chapter. In medical teleconsultation systems, the ability to replay sessions on demand is of crucial importance since it provides the opportunity to resolve arguments relating to the corresponding case and enables the multimedia content within the session to be used for teaching purposes. However, in the majority of the telemedicine and teleconsultation systems presented in the literature, playback functions are addressed only in passing or have no more than a limited functionality. Shah et al. presented a telemedicine consultation playback system in which a discrete event system specification (DEVS) approach was used to couple the data objects within the system and to model their behavior over time (Shah et al., 1997). However, whilst this approach enabled a synchronization of the various data objects during the playback sequence, the provision of specific playback functions was not considered. In the telemedicine systems (Paul et al., 1998; Guerri et al., 2003), playback functions were provided, but were restricted to chronological order only since all the communication packets within the session were time-stamped to facilitate their synchronization during playback. The event-based and event-tree systems (Kholief et al., 2003; Kim et al., 2001) provide a greater playback flexibility than these time-stamping methods, but lack time-related descriptions and indexes of the objects in the session, and are therefore unable to support playback from randomly specified time points. The PlayWatch