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Video Over IP Permits South Pole Surgery

Posted by michael on from the reading-a-lot-of-slashdot-down-there dept.

Henry Malmgren writes "Last week at the South Pole research station, we successfully completed knee surgery using a video over IP link back to the United States. The article is light on technical details, but what we did was to use a Polycom VTC unit to send a video signal to Raytheon Polar Services HQ in Colorado. Our signal went primarily over a Marisat satellite at T1 speeds, and then HQ redistributed the video to Boston via a dedicated ISDN line. We had signal problems several times during the transmission with Marisat, so we had to switch to a NASA TDRS satellite towards the end of the surgery. We also used an Iridium phone as a voice backup for the times when we couldn't get decent quality over either bird. During the surgery there were three cameras that we used to send back video to the states. One was the built in camera on the VTC unit, a second was a handheld Sony 8mm unit, and a third was a black and white "Doc Cam". This was a head mounted camera with a LED light unit that was built on station by our Senior Communications Technican, Jon Berry. This allowed the transmission of video from the Doctor's perspective. Unfortunately, while the Doc cam worked great locally, and we got great recordings of the surgery from it, it didn't work well over the satellite link. The camera view jumped around so much that it didn't compress well over the satellite link. The best video was obtained by putting the hand held camera on a tall tripod which was able to look directly into the surgical wound."

3 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Gibson injured his knee in a fall. by reduced · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    we told him to watch his step. the driveway was covered in ice.

  2. Shame on you... by pink_cup_and_hanger_ · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You'll have to stop doing this sort of thing, 17 penguins beached themselves because of the intense satellite transmissions causing mass confusion on the Ross Ice Shelf.

    You bunch of meanies...

  3. Re:This is the kind of article I like to see by guttentag · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    The technologies in Jaguar are great and all, but Apple announced them earlier, they weren't announced today. Apple just confirmed the date it will be available, which we had narrowed down to the month. I wasn't bashing them. I was simply pointing out that previous MacWorlds offered more of that "WOW" factor Jobs likes to spring on us.

    I'm a bit surprised to see the moderation my post got: Insightful=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1. I was really aiming for "Funny."

    1. "doing cool things with technology on the frontier" -- cool is an understatement for the Antarctic winter
    2. I made a show of deleting "ray of sunshine" because, as the quoted segment of the article points out, there is no sunshine in Antarctica right now.
    3. I replaced my sunshine comment with "breath of fresh air" because the article says "It also has some of the world's cleanest air"
    As I typed it all just fit, so I figured "what the heck." Of course, now that I've explained that no insight was intended in my comment, I'll be modded down: "Stupid=1" :o)