With over 400 cases each year, live surgery has been the heart and soul of mediAVentures for nearly 25 years. Bringing interactive live surgery from around the world to various venues, meetings, and congresses in HD, Ultra HD and even active 3D via satellite, point-to-point and microwave transmissions. In a continuous effort to push quality and overall experience, while reducing our footprint and physical presence within the hospital and OR workflow, we started looking into a solid NDI solution.
In early 2020, when the full impact and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic started to become apparent, we developed a custom and interactive streaming platform for our customers, allowing medical content, keynote presentations, product training sessions and research data to be shared from the comfort of your home in a webinar-style fashion, complete with live polling, Q&A sessions and on-demand content. These virtual sessions, often with multiple simultaneous rooms were all controlled from our custom designed control rooms in the Ghent headquarters.
With little to no travel options and a rising demand for live surgery cases within these new webinars, our team went back to the drawing board to come up with a minimal invasive way to control and capture live surgery cases and a reliable connection between the OR and our HQ control rooms. We started our search with a rather conceptual and unrealistic wish list, but managed to plough through all of the challenges one by one, coming up with a radical new way to make live surgery as approachable as possible, and not to forget, with no travel required at all!
After a few weeks of testing and optimising our workflow, we felt confident and left for a first trial run in the Leipzig University Hospital with 3 remote cameras, special state-of-the-art video network convertors for medical feeds and custom made, low impact, rolling steel camera pedestal and monitor stands. We connected our custom developed control station in the Ghent HQ with the German hospital using the latest streaming techniques and protocols.
We completed various successful cases and webinars in the past few months, the system allowed our live crew to focus on the job safely from the comfort of our HQ. This remote workflow has already proven to be more approachable for our customers as well, significantly lowering the productional complexity, making it easier to decide to film or organize an interactive webinar around a specific challenging case.
We look forward to even more technological advancements in 2021, further simplifying our OR workflow. The remote-or technology has been a great tool supporting and expanding our already popular webinar toolkit
The mediAVentures team
