Frank Franz

A concept for a medical device plug-and-play architecture based on web services

Medical device interoperability is still an issue. Standards exist only for specific areas like HL7 and DICOM, or have not been widely adopted like ISO/IEEE 11073 except for the domain information model at the semantic level. An approach that covers interoperability below the semantics is proposed. It is based on Web services which are widely accepted outside the medical device application domain. In particular the architecture is build on the upcoming Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS). It is a collection of existing Web services specifications for service discovery, interface description, event notification, and security. It is designed for resource-constrained devices and thus seems to be suitable as a basis for medical device plug-and-play.

Fair-Queued Ethernet for Medical Applications

Ethernet is becoming an accepted standard for more and more medical applications. It is a best-effort network standard without any transmission guarantees. However, in medical applications real-time transmission guarantees are getting more and more important.In this paper we discuss typical performance bottlenecks in medical networks and present an easy to implement solution to this problem. A fair-queued Ethernet switch with max-min fair scheduling is used to achieve transmission guarantees even in the presence of ill-behaved sources. This approach only replaces the switch hardware and thus works with unmodified hard- and software in end nodes.