JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The trend of quick evolvement and increased digital data in today’s operating rooms leads to construction of hybrid operating rooms (hybrid ORs). There is often a main control room with monitors for integrating intra-operative data from multiple devices in the hybrid OR. But there is no adequate solution for communicating the data with people outside the OR.

Objective:

The objective of the research was to design an intelligent operating room system (iOR system) augmented onto the existing information-technology infrastructure of hybrid OR in order to stream surgery performance and intra-operative imaging data.

Methods:

In this study, the authors used the all-in-one device with synergetic encoder and decoder. The device was able to stream multiple sources to one single display. The lossless video and images from specific surgical workflows were streamed outside the hybrid OR through network protocols, and were further managed by a streaming server and wireless control system. The steps of the research included: a) defining requirements and feasibility of iOR system in the hybrid OR, b) connecting multiple sources, c) setting-up equipments across the hybrid OR and the conference room, d) designing video management system, e) real-time streaming under specific surgical workflows.

Results:

The wired streaming video were shown simultaneously on the display in the hybrid OR and on the display in the conference room with near-zero latency. And the interactive video between the hybrid OR and the outside conference room could be achieved through the bi-directional wireless control system. Furthermore, the functions of recording, archiving, and playback were successfully provided by the streaming server.

Conclusions:

This flexible and cost-effective iOR system not only provided educational benefits but also contributed for surgical tele-mentoring.