Technology Sandbox Provides Support for Presentation of Live Surgery

While viewing taped surgeries on television has become fairly common, streaming a live surgery through the Internet in real time so that doctors and medical students can talk about the procedure is a much trickier event. That’s where the power of Internet2 recently came into play – along with the power of several UCLA, Stanford University, USC, UC San Diego and University of Wisconsin -La Crosse technologists.

UCLA worked with the other four universities to create a premiere event at the Internet2 Fall Member conference recently hosted by USC and held at the Wilshire Grand Hotel in Los Angeles. As the official launching of CORN – the California Orthopedic Research Network – technologists streamed a live hand surgery from the UCLA Medical Center to the Visualization Portal, Stanford University’s SUMMIT, and the conference site in downtown Los Angeles.

Medical students, participating from the Visualization Portal were able to ask questions of the surgeon, Dr. Neil Jones and anesthetist, Dr. Randy Steadman and to converse with orthopedic specialists who were doing the conference presentation at the Wilshire Grand. Doctors at Stanford University projected and manipulated a 3-D hand model to further instruct students about the surgery.

The goal of the project was to see what teaching opportunities are becoming possible because of the power of Internet2.

UCLA’s Technology Sandbox – led by a team from Academic Technology Services - was responsible for technical aspects of the project, which depended on getting the live stream out of the UCLA Med Center Operating Room and transmitting that stream to the other sites via the ATS network. The stream went to the Visualization Portal, the Grand Wilshire Hotel, and to Stanford University. Preparing connections in advance was critical to the project, and Communications Technology Services worked hard the week prior to the event to ensure that everything was connected and working properly. A team from the Office of Instructional Development – masked and scrubbed – handled all the taping and connections inside the OR.

In addition to the stream of the actual surgery taking place in the OR, the Technology Sandbox team also had to videoconference presenters at the Wilshire Grand, students in the Visualization Portal, the doctors in the operating room, and the surgeon at Stanford. Complicating technical matters even further – but adding an important educational component - was the Stanford demonstration of 3-dimensional virtual reality shapes of a dissected hand, which the surgeon at Stanford remotely manipulated to explain details to students in the Portal and participants at the conference site.

Participants in the CORN presentation were:

Neil Jones, University of California, Los Angeles
Randolph H. Steadman, University of California, Los Angeles
LuAnn Wilkerson, University of California, Los Angeles
Anju Relan, University of California, Los Angeles
W. Edward Johansen, Internet2 Health Science Leadership Team
Wayne H. Akeson, University of California, San Diego
Parvati Dev, Stanford University
Sakti Srivastava, Stanford University
Chadwick F. Smith, University of Southern California