JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digitalization affects almost every aspect of modern daily life including a growing number of healthcare services along with telemedicine applications. 5th. generation mobile communication technology (5G) has the potential to meet the requirements for this digitalized future with high bandwidths (10 GB/s), low latency (< 1ms) and high quality of service, enabling wireless real-time data transmission in telemedical emergency health care applications.

Objective:

We present the results of a 5G field test framework enabling preclinical diagnostics with mobile ultrasound for emergency patients using 5G network slicing technology.

Methods:

A bi-directional audio-video data transmission between ambulance car and hospital was established, combining both 5G-radio and -core network parts. Besides technical performance evaluations also medical assessment of transferred ultrasound image quality and transmission latency was examined.

Results:

Telemedical and clinical application properties of the ultrasound probe were rated very good – good (VAS). The 5G field test revealed an average End-2-End round trip latency of 10 ms. The measured average throughput for the ultrasound image traffic was 4 Mbps and for the video stream 12 Mbps. Traffic saturation revealed a lower video quality and a slower video stream. Without core slicing, the throughput for the video application was reduced to 8 Mbps. Deployment of core network slicing facilitated quality and latency recovery.

Conclusions:

Bi-directional data transmission between ambulance car and remote hospital site was successfully established through the 5G network, facilitating sending/receiving data and measurements from both applications (ultrasound unit and video streaming). Core slicing was implemented for better user experience.