Advanced fiber optic systems for efficient medical image transmission: a telemedicine perspective

The increasing demand for secure, high-quality medical image transmission across healthcare institutions has posed a significant challenge to modern telemedicine systems. Traditional network infrastructures often fail to provide sufficient bandwidth and low latency required for transferring large volumes of high-resolution medical images, such as MRI and CT scans, over long distances. To address this limitation, a fiber-optic transmission framework was designed and evaluated with the objective of enhancing the speed, reliability, and accuracy of inter-hospital medical image sharing. In this study, a simulation-based approach was employed using OPTISYSTEM and MATLAB to model the optical transmission chain, including stages of image digitization, modulation, fiber propagation, and optical-to-electrical conversion at the receiving end. Various performance parameters such as Bit Error Rate (BER), Quality Factor (Q), transmission power, and noise levels were analyzed for different image resolutions and transmission distances. The results showed that Q-Factor values between 8.5 and 9.5 were obtained, with BER reaching values as low as 10⁻²⁰, even for high-resolution images transmitted over distances up to 90 km. These results were compared to existing benchmarks in the literature and demonstrated superior performance. The proposed system exhibited strong robustness in handling large image datasets, with minimal signal distortion and negligible transmission errors. It was concluded that the adoption of this fiber-optic architecture could significantly improve the efficiency of telemedicine applications, offering a reliable and high-capacity solution for real-time diagnostic collaboration and patient monitoring between geographically distributed medical facilities.