The Next Step in Health Care: TelemedicineNovember 13, 2008Imagine 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. "Previous efforts in telemedicine have been hampered by the quality of the video stream produced and the potential for network interruptions," says Gurcharan Khanna, director of research computing at RIT and a member of the research team. "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." The researchers utilized a 30-megabit-per-second broadcast quality video stream, which produces high quality images, and configured it to be transmitted via multicast using Microsoft Research's ConferenceXP system. This level of real time video was not possible in the past due to slower and lower quality computer networks. The team also utilized a Polycom videoconferencing system to connect all parties. The team will next conduct additional tests with different surgical procedures and an expanded number of remote locations. The researchers' goal is to transfer the technology for use in medical education and actual diagnostic applications. "Today, physicians often need to travel to both examine patients and conduct consultations," says Khanna. "Given the growing capacity of Internet technologies, the development of live remote consultation with high quality video could revolutionize medicine and greatly enhance the care patients can receive while reducing overall costs to the health care system." The research is being funded through a grant from the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health to the University of Puerto Rico. The team also includes Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Michigan School of Medicine and the Office of High-Performance Computing at the National Library of Medicine. For more information about the project visit http://rc.rit.edu/endo.html or http://rcmi.rcm.upr.edu. Rochester Institute of Technology |
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| Related Telemedicine Current Events and Telemedicine News Articles Pre-hospital organization: The first links in the chain of survival for heart attack patients Mortality rate following a heart attack has fallen by more than 50% in Europe over the past 25 years. However, because only minor advances in the medical treatment of AMI are expected over the next decade, it is through organisational changes in the pre-hospital phase that mortality rate will continue this decline to below 5%. Internet complicates doctor-patient relationships Patients who ask their doctor about information they have read on the Internet, or webs that better inform them of their diagnosis, are no longer a rarity. Retinopathy of prematurity diagnosis time significantly reduced using telemedicine To be properly diagnosed, retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), the leading cause of childhood blindness in the United States and worldwide, requires a time intensive process and significant coordination between ophthalmologist and NICU staff. Nationwide telemedicine networks are essential for successful health care reform The U.S. healthcare system is in critical need of basic change to enable more equitable, effective, efficient care. Experts in various fields of medicine, public health, and industry propose that telemedicine, or information technology enhanced healthcare, must be a core component of a viable healthcare reform strategy. Telemedicine Expands Reach of Care for Parkinson's Patients A unique and innovative telemedicine project is providing distant nursing home patients with Parkinson's disease access to neurologists at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC). Novel biomarkers in heart failure Several new biomarkers have been recently described in Heart Failure (HF) syndrome either in stable chronic patients as in the settings of acute decompensation. Telemedicine may improve care for school children with diabetes Type 1 diabetes is the most common chronic childhood disease. The management of this serious medical condition includes regular fingerstick glucose measurements, multiple daily injections of insulin, and frequent insulin dose adjustments. NASA's electronic nose may provide neurosurgeons with a new weapon against brain cancer An unlikely multidisciplinary scientific collaboration has discovered that an electronic nose developed for air quality monitoring on Space Shuttle Endeavour can also be used to detect odour differences in normal and cancerous brain cells. Telehealth for diabetes promotes aging at home, not in the hospital A large study of ethnically and racially diverse individuals with diabetes has found that home telemonitoring of their health resulted in significantly fewer deaths than in a similar group that was not monitored. Diabetes is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Telemedicine can dramatically improve child sexual assault examinations in rural areas The use of telemedicine can dramatically improve the quality of child sexual assault examinations in rural communities where rates of abuse and neglect are highest - sometimes more than double the statewide rate - a study published in the January issue of the medical journal Pediatrics has found. More Telemedicine Current Events and Telemedicine News Articles |
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