Amazon AppStream provides a platform for server side rendering that promises to be interactive enough for gaming. Since gamers have high standards for interactivity, this technology could very well enable cloud based server side rendering for medical imaging.
Currently AppStream only has servers in the US East region of AWS (located in North Virginia) which means that interactivity will decrease the farther you get from the datacenter. Amazon does plan to expand AppStream to the other regions which are located in Northern California and Oregon in the US (click here for zones outside of the US). The system will automatically connect clients to the server that will provide the best experience which is really convenient for application developers. Interactivity may indeed be very good for the west coast and some parts of the east coast, but it may not be good enough for the rest of the country. Amazon could of course solve this problem by adding additional AppStream data centers across the country and this seems reasonable if the service is indeed successful.
One cool trick AppStream uses is H.264 to stream the screen from the server to the client. H.264 is one of the more popular video codecs in use today - it is used in blu-ray discs, iTunes and youtube. H.264 is computationally expensive to encode so using it for real time streaming is truly impressive. They must be doing the encoding using the GPU or perhaps even specialized hardware.
While this technology certainly has potential, the lack of encryption of the video stream will prevent it from being used for PHI due to HIPAA. Life Sciences and medical imaging is a stated use case so hopefully they can resolve this in the future.
Note: All of the above information is based on what I gleamed from the publicly available information on the Amazon AppStream web site (specifically the FAQs)
I'd have assumed the lack of a lossless image compression mode would also be a pretty big deal breaker for many medical imaging applications too.
ReplyDeleteGood point, that will certainly be an issue for some. I have recently discovered that diagnostic reading using lossy images is actually quite common. I know there have been some studies done that show lossy is acceptable for diagnostic purposes but given that bandwidth is plentiful today I don't see it worth the risk.
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