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Surgeon Performs World's First 4X HD Surgery
docinthemachine writes with word of some "research just presented at the 65th ASRM on 4K surgery. Using bleeding-edge Hollywood 4K cameras coupled to laparoscopes, surgery was performed in 4K, or 4X the resolution of HD. Since laparoscopy is performed while viewing on a video monitor, this is a huge advancement of resolution and clarity for the surgeon. It only took a million dollars of projectors to show it to the audience."
What an unfortunate choice of words.
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The reviews were stinky. Entirely too long and the plot seemingly went in circles.
I knew the
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that is tattooed on my ass would come handy.
and $5 million in damages to the MPAA for illegally pirating an episode of ER
liqbase
Oh... not that kind of 4X? In that case, I'll pass.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
From the article:
Why we did it- the Hollywood connection: New cinematic technologies are transforming the film business today. The two major revolutionary developments are 1) beyond high def “4k” technology - which brings resolution to 4 times that of HD and 2) realistic immersive high definition 3D. I set out to introduce these technologies to the medical world and to see if we could for the first time directly perform surgery in 4k. Setting the goal to once again use technological innovation to improve our patient outcomes.
In other words, "We did it because HD is a buzzword." If the camera is less than a few cm away from what you're looking at, do you really need that high of a resolution?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Red One only outputs 720p, so they are not going to use the full 4k resolution while previewing.
I have worked with Red One many times. Somewhat buggy software, camera crashing mid turning over.
I just checked their screenshots on my 1280x1024 17" LCD and I'm really amazed at the picture quality that 4x HD can provide!
With Hollywood, 4K refers to the horizontal resolution. With HDTVs, 1080p means the vertical resolution of 1920x1080. Therefore, it is approximately twice the resolution in the X dimension.
Well, actually, it's around 3.5 HD, but it's the thought that counts.
This baby is awesome. I get to look at tons of displays for work and this one still takes the cake- it's made by Barco, is incredibly bright, has a built in calibration puck, comes with some decent software (ie, easily 'configured' for our purposes), and all around blows the socks off of everything on the market.
Don't mind the $16K price tag.
The diffuser used is so clean you could eat off it- none of that nasty subsurface artifacting that looks like dust on your screen (speckle). Just pure, rich, saturated colors that are accurately represented with no TFT structure to worry about.
Now, IBM had the T221 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors) which had a native resolution of 3840x2200- at 200ppi- so that your eyes could never make out the substructure of the pixels. Best of all the monitor had hardware interpolation- it could be used at 1/2x to basically present the user a clean screen with nothing to distract your eyes from. IBM did this back in 2000!
This isn't as big a breakthrough as I first thought.
I thought it said "sturgeon".
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
By their own admission the Red camera is more like 2.8K - They use a 4K Beyer pattern sensor which produces much less resolution than the total number of horizontal elements. Images are at best comparable to those produced by standard video cameras using 2/3 inch prism optics. This has been scientifically proven by Kodak in extensive testing using standard image evaluation methodologies. The Sony projectors that were used while capable of 4K images only use a portion of the display area to produce HiDef (1920X1080) stereo images. So while portions of the program may have been presented in 4K the images were not by any stretch 4K if they were produced by the Red camera. The 3D portions were in HiDef if they used the Sony 4K projector for that portion of the presentation. As mentioned elsewhere, the realtime output of the red camera is less than 4K so the surgeon does not see a "4K" image as he is performing the surgery - he has to wait for the relatively lengthy post process to complete in order to see his pictures. Real 4K equipment does exist - they just weren't using it. They might have gotten quicker and higher quality results by using a 35mm film camera to record the operation - processing the film and scanning at 4K. It would have taken about as long as their post process and produced real 4K images.
Not to mention the fact that you can fast forward through the commercials and have an instant replay of everything one might find interesting during such a procedure.
Face your daemons!
4K is roughly 4,000 pixels across, not 4X "HD", which is probably assuming HD to be defined as 1920X1080. 4x HD, if you multiply each dimension, would be 7680x4320, a lot higher. I did see a demo of an 8k system earlier this year at NAB, quite nice on a large screen. Downsampled to 4k on a smaller screen and it was jawdropping. now if overall you mean four times the data, then yes, because it's roughly x2 in each dimension in two dimensions.
We've always used the horizontal pixel resolution to define filmout resolutions for cinema. (2k, 4k, etc.) Consumer product manufacturers use the retarded "megapixels" number so it sounds larger and more impressive. (multiply width x height for total pixel count).
I'm impressed that the camera optics they rigged into the laproscopy procedure had enough fidelity to make a 4k image worthwhile from such a small imaging source.
The RED system is the current darling of high end 'indie' filmmakers, TV shows and commercial producers everywhere where 4k is desirable, while the Canon 5D Mk. II is being used extensively for 2k owing to its full frame, exceptionally sharp sensor combined with Canon's unbeatable lenses, despite the fact that it is primarily a still camera. Both were all over the place at NAB this year, and I have the 5D Mk. II myself. The tools are getting cheaper and better every year and a lot of the old names in broadcasting are fading away...
--M
720p ought to be enough for just about anybody.
We should ask, why do we have 1080i and 720p? Because viewing tests showed that at three picture heights, these resolutions pretty much maxed out the human visual resolution. There was not much to be gained from increased resolution.
Now if you view closer than three picture heights, higher resolution becomes important...