Challenges in Processing Medical Images in Mobile Devices

To provide an adequate and timely response to patients, medical images for supporting diagnosis must be easily and efficiently accessed by health professionals anywhere at anytime. The widely adopted technology of mobile devices, especially smartphones, can provide this ubiquity. Additionally, due to the advances in processors with low power consumption, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones can handle computationally intensive applications. Therefore, we can also take advantage of these devices to process images that require substantial amounts of resources in a distributed way. This article examines several technical issues involved in using smartphones for the distributed processing of medical images. Issues include the execution in the Android OS of already existing applications and their scheduling taking into account mobile devices’ characteristics. The exposition is done from the lessons learned using BOINC as an execution platform.