Live Internet Video-Streaming from Surgical Operating Room to Remote Computer Using Skype™ and Off-the-Shelf Solutions

Neil S. Shah

Visual input from a surgical site can be transmitted real-time over the Internet from a laparoscopic tower to personal computer or laptop situated in a remote location, with cost-effective and easy-to-use materials.

Real-time video display is provided by the laparoscope camera input and sent to a DVI2USB Solo frame grabber (700.00 USD, manufactured by Epiphan Systems Inc), which can capture single-link Digital Video Interface (DVI) video signals via a male-to-male DVI cable connected to the laparoscopic tower. A frame grabber obtains a large amount of visual data, converts it to RGB format at the highest color depth it can support, then compresses and optimizes the data for transmission. This particular frame grabber model was chosen for its ability to acquire video signals from DVI sources (in this case, the laparoscopic tower), and the Solo specifically because it can support the output of the video source. The frame grabber dimensions are highly compact (5” x 3.2” x 1.2”) and itself is commercially available to any consumer at a price of approximately 700.00 USD. The Solo package comes with the DVI2USB solo box, DVI cable, USB cable, power adapter and easy-to-apply user’s installation guide.

The output from the frame grabber connects to any standard laptop with USB 2.0 standard port via USB mini type B cable, and is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista (x86, amd64), Mac OS X, or Linux (x86, amd64) operating systems. DVI2USB solo transfers substantial amounts of data for each captured frame (30 frames per second at any resolution up to 1920x1200) and as such is not compatible with the slower USB 1.0 and 1.1 buses. The advantage of this is DVI2USB solo does not reduce the resolution of the images it captures in order to transfer it over USB.

The captured data can be sent by the Epiphan USB device driver to the video capture application as well as to Microsoft DirectShow (on Windows) or Epiphan QuickTime component (on Mac OS X). The Epiphan video capture application receives and processes the data so that users can display, modify, and record images. In Windows, data can be sent to a video codec in order to save as Windows AVI files, and Mac OS X can record video using QuickTime software. This capability is highly valuable for the purpose of data storage and quality control.

Next, using Skype™, a free-to-use consumer market videoconferencing software, one must set the DVI2USB Solo Driver as the primary webcam. For transmission to a remote laptop or projection workstation, the user only has to sign in with a user account, and make a video call to a recipient available for contact, and the stream is captured live by the recipient’s computer.