eHealth

This presentation will describe the successful new procedures we developed to enable capture of the Video and synchronized PowerPoint material in Medical "Grand Rounds" and subsequent delivery in both live and asynchronous modes over the Internet. We will also describe the Internet "Chat" capability that enabled the Grand Rounds to be semi-Interactive. An Internet Portal was also created to enable easy Internet access to these features.

James Chamberlain is the Information Technology Group Manager and a product developer for AZ Technology, Inc. AZTek is a small business located in Huntsville that specializes in scientific and engineering research and development for NASA, DoD, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and industry. He is currently principal investigator for an NIH-funded teledermatology project with University of Alabama at Birmingham. Bob Middleton is a Senior Research Engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He currently leads the UAH Multimedia Lab in computer and video development related to remote Education and TeleHealth. He is also a co-owner of a copyright on software that enables a new approach to capture and deliver live Powerpoint presentations over the Internet.

We first review a new video system in the new UAB Hospital's operating room suite. After this snapshot, we examine future possibilities for end-to-end digital transmission with no analog links, no further compression than what comes out of a digital video camera, color management, video distribution over optical fibers - particularly plastic optical fibers, and end-to-end high quality digital sound tightly integrated with the video signal. We also consider the possibility of capture, transmission, editing, storage, and displaying video signals with no changes of format in healthcare environments, emphasizing pure pixel to pixel mapping. We also present our recent work on real-time DV over IP teleconferencing for medicine and discuss the future of HDV and other forms of HD over IP. We conclude by discussing healthcare applications of digital wireless video.

Gary Grimes joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) faculty in August 1994. As the first holder of the Wallace R. Bunn Chair in Telecommunications, he is managing research programs in optical interconnection, telepresence, and virtual reality. Before joining the UAB faculty, he was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T/Lucent Bell Laboratories where he completed research in switching and transmission. He is widely published and holds 72 US patents. He holds a BS in physics from Colorado College, a MS in physics from the U. of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the U. of Colorado-Boulder.

Interactive DV over IP system was applied to telemedicine and distance case discussion. Demonstrational experiments on telemedicine and distance case discussions were performed with several medical doctors and business school members at Keio University. The distance case discussion experiment was carried out by connecting four different sites were simultaneously connected via DV over IP system. Very interesting requirements on DV over IP systems from medical doctors and attendees of the case study discussions will be reported.

Takaaki Ishigure received the B. S. degree in Applied Chemistry and the M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in Material Science from Keio University, Japan in 1991, 1993, and 1996 respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Keio University. He has been concurrently a group leader of Japan Science and Technology Agency, ERATO project. He is staying in Columbia University, Department of Electrical Engineering in 2005 as a visiting research scientist.