Real-time transmission of full-motion echocardiography over a high-speed data network: impact of data rate and network quality of service.

Unlabelled: With high-resolution network transmission required for telemedicine, education, and guided-image acquisition, the impact of errors and transmission rates on image quality needs evaluation.

Methods: We transmitted clinical echocardiograms from 2 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) research centers with the use of Motion Picture Expert Group-2 (MPEG-2) encoding and asynchronous transmission mode (ATM) network protocol over the NASA Research and Education Network. Data rates and network quality (cell losses [CLR], errors [CER], and delay variability [CVD]) were altered and image quality was judged.