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MOBILE SURGICAL COLLABORATION USING 5G
During the Cybersec Europe trade fair in Brussels on 31 May 2024, the Belgian Computabe Awards were presented. In the category Project of the Year in Health Market, the first prize went to ‘Mobile Surgical Collaboration and Assistance from Anywhere (MSCAA), an initiative of Barco, Orange Belgium and KU Leuven. Viktor Vörös, research engineer at Barco and member of the Robot-Assisted Surgery Group (Group T Campus) explains.
As technology continues to penetrate the medical world, more and more complex devices are making their way into operating theatres. These not only create new possibilities for procedures and treatments but also require a steep learning curve for surgeons, resulting in a shortage of experts in the field. “That’s exactly where the challenge lies”, says Viktor. “Experts cannot be in multiple operating rooms or hospitals at once. A solution is needed to exploit their knowledge at multiple locations.”
Therefore, the MSCAA project aims to enable surgeons in operating rooms to call on expertise available externally. “Hospitals are increasingly experiencing the need to have remote experts assist the team in the operating theatre,” Viktor continues. “While mobile surgical collaboration is an important step forward, it also creates a new challenge: the availability of reliable technology.”
Bandwidth
Barco, a Belgian company specializing in medical display technology and solutions for digital operating rooms, was already able to provide a crucial part of the solution: the Nexxis Live platform that allows experts outside the hospital to communicate in real time with surgeons in the operating theatre.
“Nexxis Live is designed to work on a high-quality, high-resolution display connected to a computer that has a reliable network connection”, Viktor continues. “However, experts are not always active on a fixed workstation. They are often only accessible via tablet or smartphone. Another limitation is the quality of the network. Nowadays 4G networks cannot always guarantee the connectivity or safety required to stream clinical procedures.”
Orange Belgium took care of the 5G connectivity. “5G is the cutting-edge technology that can lead to a more mobile version of Nexxis Live”, explains Viktor. “It provides the necessary bandwidth needed by the remote expert to have a razor-sharp image of the operation. After all, all details and colour differences can be clinically relevant. This is why Nexxis Live transmits the images in high quality to the remote computers. Conversely, the expert can also communicate in real time with the surgery team and highlight specific places in the image. For a seamless collaboration, the delay between capturing and displaying the image should therefore be minimal.”
Safe
An additional benefit of 5G is better privacy protection. “Using 5G, images can be sent over a secure connection from the hospital to the remote expert. Once the expert launches the app, a specific slice of the available bandwidth is allocated to ensure that all communication is over a stable and private connection.”
The MSCAA project puts another ambitious goal in reach: controlling robots to perform (parts of) surgical procedures. “The next step is that an expert can also perform the surgery remotely by controlling a surgical robot over 5G”, says Viktor. “At the Robot-Assisted Surgery group, we have been developing robotic devises for various surgical domains. Our input in the project is therefore mainly situated in providing a robotic setup connected to the 5G network to evaluate the possibilities with remote robotic surgery via experiments.”
Autostereoscopic
In the Robot-Assisted Surgery group and in collaboration with Barco, Viktor has been taking part in thesis development of a new visualization technology that can be used in healthcare, including minimally invasive surgery and image-guided therapy. “Advances in high-resolution 3D endoscopy and 3D reconstruction of CT scans have brought about a sharp increase in 3D content”, says Viktor. “However, when 3D data is displayed on 2D screens, essential depth information is lost. Aurosteoscopic visualisation or ASV is a promising solution. Thanks to a built-in eye-tracking system and lenticular lens technology, 3D content can be displayed directly to the user’s viewpoint while the user can perceive this 3D content without wearing special glasses. This visualization method can potentially reduce the mental load of surgeons and improve ergonomics.”
In his PhD work, Viktor investigated the clinical requirements of ASV developed tools to verify the performance of the technology and validated its potential benefit via user studies. ”I hope my findings can help bridge the gap in the state-of-art and bring ASV to the medical market”, Viktor concludes. “The next steps include further studies to demonstrate the added value, and eventually its commercialization either as a standalone display or integrated into other medical devices.”
Yves Persoons
