GIGA FOR HEALTH: 5G-Medizincampus.NRW

Photo of a server rack with a monitor on it.

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A young man in the background looks through virtual reality glasses at a cross-section of brain layers with various anatomical structures. A hand appears in the foreground on the left edge of the image, pointing at the hologram with its index finger.

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Photo of a section of a digital board on which a code can be seen. Someone is holding a pen pointing to a spot.

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A group of young people standing in a circle look at the hologram of a human torso skeleton through virtual reality glasses.

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Four young people look at a cross-section of a human skull with various anatomical structures through virtual reality glasses.

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About the project

In the Giga For Health project funded by the state of NRW as part of the 5G.NRW funding program, Fachhochschule Dortmund was responsible for the "Concept and implementation of mobile edge computing" work package.

The GIGA FOR HEALTH project (5G Medizincampus.NRW) was carried out from 01.05.2021 to 30.06.2023. The goal of saving lives with 5G was to be achieved with a total of eight partners, the University Hospital Düsseldorf (UKD; consortium leader), Vodafone GmbH, RWTH Aachen University (Institute for High Frequency Technology), Fachhochschule Dortmund (Faculty of Computer Science), Brainlab AG, the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM), the University of Wuppertal, the North Rhine Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (associated partner).

A total of four main work packages were provided in the funding program. These are

Work package 1: 5G campus network,
Work package 2: 5G Mixed Reality,
Work package 3: 5G intelligent networking with innovative telemedicine and
Work package 4: Project coordination, evaluation and transfer.

These work packages were in turn subdivided into sub-areas covering typical critical medical areas in which the actual benefits of 5G were to be tested.

Fachhochschule Dortmund was primarily involved in work package 1, specifically in work package 1.3: Concept and implementation of mobile edge computing.

Work package 1.3: Mobile Edge Computing

Goals

The objectives of work package 1.3 (Mobile Edge Computing) were:

Support edge infrastructure planning and setup (network & IT)
Development of edge emulation platform and edge diagnostics platform
Emulation of edge infrastructures
Analysis and modeling of edge service quality
Optimization of edge service quality

With these objectives, Fachhochschule Dortmund made a significant contribution to the successful implementation of work package 3.4 (organ harvesting and transplantation in NRW). The target use case was to be able to perform a heart transplant with AR and Edge support.

Results

The main results of the project are an edge emulation platform (open source) and an edge diagnostics platform. Based on these platforms, new algorithms in the field of edge resource management and edge handoff were developed and published as scientific articles.

A high-performance edge infrastructure was also set up as part of the project (5G campus network, high-performance edge server, etc.).

Publications

The following articles were published as part of the Giga For Health project:

A. Muslim and S. Recker, "End-to-End Latency Measurements with Black Box Components," 2023 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS), Dortmund, December 2023, pp. 73-78, doi: 10.1109/IDAACS58523.2023.10348913.(Opens in a new tab)
M. Abdulmaksoud, N. Dehadrai, J. Castrillon, A. Sakr, and R. Schuster, "Edge Diagnostics Platform: Orchestration and Diagnosis Model for Edge Computing Infrastructure," IEEE EDGE 2021, December 2021, doi: 10.1109/EDGE53862.2021.00017.(Opens in a new tab)
R. Gazda, M. Roy, J. Blakley, A. Sakr, and R. Schuster, "Towards Open and Cross Domain Edge Emulation - The AdvantEDGE Platform," The Sixth ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing: the 2nd Workshop on Edge Computing and Communications (EdgeComm), December 2021, doi: 10.1145/3453142.3493518.(Opens in a new tab)
T. Bui, A. Sakr, J. Castrillon, and R. Schuster, "Six-factors Score-based Match-making Based on Priority and Preemption for Resource Allocation in Edge Computing," IEEE EDGE 2021, December 2021, doi: 10.1109/EDGE53862.2021.00016.(Opens in a new tab)

The "GIGA FOR HEALTH: 5G Medizincampus.NRW" project was funded as part of the 5G.NRW funding competition and financed by the Ministry of Business Studies, Innovation, Digitalization and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia on the basis of the 5G.NRW guideline.