Doctors commented their own surgeries on-line

Prague, November 6, 2013. During the State of the Art medical conference on urogynecology and reconstruction pelvis surgery that took place in Zlín on 1st and 2nd November the CESNET Association provided a video transmission of several surgeries.

On 1st November the CESNET provided the conference participants with the moderated interactive live surgery broadcast. The operating doctors – heads of gynecology departments from across the Czech Republic – thus were able to react immediately to the questions from the conference hall where their surgeries performed in Regional Tomáš Baťa hospital were projected in HD and displayed in 2D and 3D formats. The broadcast included surgeries performed simultaneously in up to three operating theaters. Due to ethical reasons the broadcast was only opened for specialists gathered in the Congress Center Zlín.

The transmission was performed with a use of UltraGrid technology that enables the video transmissions realization on a common PC or Mac computer hardware with a latency less than 100 ms, either by a non-compressed video or by a video compression accelerated on graphical cards while the quality of compressed video is visually non-distinguishable from a non-compressed video.

For a long time the CESNET Association has been involved in the development of HD video transmission applications that can be used in the medicine. In particular in the area of on-line surgery broadcasts CESNET is one of the world leaders. Its achievements in this area are regularly presented on important technical forums. CESNET also collaborates with leading medical centers worldwide.

UltraGrid is a technology developed by the CESNET Association as one of the key components of the Large infrastructure for low-latency video transmissions over the Internet from the HD to 2160p/4K. Video can be compressed by an M-JPEG codec that is accelerated on the graphical cards which enables low-latency compression and decompression in a real-time, up to 2160p/4K. The UltraGrid system uses common graphical cards supporting NVidea CUDA technology and is applicable on a common PC or Mac hardware. UltraGrid supports also a low-latency H.264 compression on CPU and thus includes the whole spectrum of deployable bandwidth for HD video from 10 Mbps (H.264) up to 2.2 Gbps (non-compressed HD video with 4:4:4 sampling). This technology deployment allows a fully interactive collaboration within the national network environment namely thanks to a one-way transmission latency of less than 100 ms, and for low-latency H.264 compression of approximately 160 ms. With an appropriate compression settings the final video quality is non-distinguishable from the non-compressed video.

The CESNET Association was founded by Czech universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in 1996. It is engaged in research and development in information and communication technologies and builds and develops the CESNET national e-infrastructure for research and education. With its research activities and accomplishments, CESNET represents the Czech Republic in international projects, most notably the pan-European GÉANT network development and grid projects (EGI.eu), and participates actively in their implementation. Among other things, the association works on the deployment of high-speed networks for sharing multimedia data, both through synchronous video conferencing and shared applications and asynchronous streaming.

Press release, November 6 2013

Last change: 8.11.2013