Sunday, November 16, 2008

Live Surgeries Using Internet may Soon be A Reality

[I found this interesting article in medindia.com which would be of interest to technology enthusiasts. Read this and post comments if you like:
Source: http://www.medindia.com/news/Live-Surgeries-Using-Internet-may-Soon-be-A-Reality-44102-1.htm]

A multi-university research team, including an Indian-origin expert, is testing the live broadcast of surgeries using the advanced networking consortium 'Internet2'.

The technology, allows for the transmission of high quality video to multiple locations in real time, may enable doctors from different hospitals across the world to collaborate on a surgery, without having to actually be in the operation theatre.

The technology was recently tested by a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, which has now been joined by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology.

An endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the U.S. with the aid of a high-speed network.

The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.

"The University of Puerto Rico has been performing this type of transmission between two sites for more than a year, but we are now able to utilize a combination of technologies that allows us to transmit to multiple sites simultaneously," says Jose Conde, director of the Center for Information Architecture in Research at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus.

"Being isolated geographically from major research centers, we need to use information technology to foster research collaborations with scientists around the world," Conde adds.

Gurcharan Khanna, director of research computing at RIT and a member of the research team, says: "Previous efforts in telemedicine have been hampered by the quality of the video stream produced and the potential for network interruptions. This test demonstrates that by using the speed and advanced protocols support provided by the Internet2 network, we have the potential to develop real-time, remote consultation and diagnosis during surgery, taking telemedicine to the next level."

No comments: