Imagine a scenario where doctors from different hospitals can collaborate on a surgery without having to actually be in the operating room.
What if doctors in remote locations could receive immediate expert support from top specialists in hospitals around the world?
This environment could soon become a reality thanks to research by a multi-university partnership that is testing the live broadcast of surgeries using the advanced networking consortium Internet2.
Rochester Institute of Technology is collaborating with a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine that recently tested technology, which allows for the transmission of high quality, real time video to multiple locations. Using a secure, high-speed network, an endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the United States. The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.
Results from the test were presented at a meeting of the collaboration special interest group at the fall 2008 Internet2 member meeting in New Orleans.
"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," notes José 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.