Novel Efficient and Secure Medical Data Transmission on WiMAX

An efficient and secure transmission of clinical data was evaluated over an open Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) wireless channel. This paper provides an explanation of this technology, which is used to transmit x-ray images and electrocardiogram (ECG) scans.

This paper discusses an improved technique for bandwidth-efficient and secure transmission of medical records over simulated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)/IEEE 802.16 physical layer. Medical data compaction along with security has been achieved by embedding electrocardiogram (ECG) data into Haar wavelet coefficients of an x-ray image that is transmitted over the channel. The compaction ratio and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) between the transmitted and received x-ray images for visual clinical performance have been evaluated. It is shown that 12.5% data compaction along with true reception of ECG signal can be achieved for channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ≥ 9.6 dB while the achieved PSNR was 55.97 dB. The PSNR value is well above the minimum acceptable 35 dB level, making it potentially useful for secure and bandwidth-efficient transmission of clinical records.