Live Surgery in 3D!

3D Live Surgery

When most people think of 3D video, big blockbuster movies come to mind. 3D-TV has not really penetrated the home market as quickly as HD for example. Most of the content available to home viewers is produced content, not live video. As a live transmission company, producing a live 3D broadcast presented a lot of challenges in uncharted waters. DCI recently worked with Boxline Box medical communications to transmit the first-ever live broadcast of a 3D surgery at the American Urology Association (AUA) annual convention in San Diego, CA. While most medical broadcasts are done via videoconference, Boxline’s highly experienced Operating Room video staff and DCI’s quality-obsessed field uplink engineers combine perfectly to produce the best looking live broadcasts in the medical communications industry.

More about 3D Live Surgery Technology

3D Live Surgery

The AUA conference includes a lot of live video from the daVinci robotic surgical system, which natively works in 3D for the surgeon doing the procedure. All the previous feeds we have done were all standard 2D HD, but this year we stepped it up a level to provide the same 3D HD video seen by the operating surgeon.

Because the data required to carry uncompressed 3D HD video exceeds the 1.5gbps defined in SMPTE-292M, commonly known as HD-SDI, there are two ways to carry this content. SMPTE 424M is the most simple within a production plant, it uses a single coaxial cable with a data rate of around 3.0gbps. This interface is commonly referred to as 3G-SDI, although the “G” stands for gigabit, not “Generation” as 3G cellular standards. The only problem with 3G-SDI is very few HD encoders and receiver/decoders used by satellite trucks and teleports are capable of handling it, and the few that do require expensive license keys which no one has purchased due to the lack of 3D transmission requests.

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