Analysis of Xvid Video codec for clinical quality assessment in tele-echocardiography

The use of a tele-echocardiography system requires the use of lossy compression in order to reduce the transmission rates. That´s the reason because guaranteeing clinical quality is a highly desired goal. In this paper we introduce two types of tests designed to obtain cardiologists´ opinion and translate them to a clinical index. After that, we use this index to establish the recommendable transmission rate when using Xvid video codec in a tele-echocardiography system. Results show that the recommended rate depends on the echocardiography mode: 384 kbps for 2D and M mode, 256 kbps for color Doppler mode and 128 kbps for pulse and continuous Doppler mode.