A partnership with the Northwestern Center for Advanced Surgical Education (NCASE), the Feinberg School of Medicine Simulation Technology and Immersive Learning (STIL) program, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, John’s Hopkins University, University of California at San Francisco, Northwestern University IT A&RT and NU IT iCair, delivered a combination of H.323 videoconferencing and HD streaming to facilitate a full days worth of presentations and live demonstrations on hips, knees and other joints using cadaver’s.
This two-day conference, which was being discussed in late 2011, resulted in over 110 combined hours of meetings, testing, more meetings, more testing, coordinating staff and other resources and evaluating our decisions in order to pull off the event.
Computer-based presentations were given simultaneously with high-definition video streams from the NCASE facility. Direct Q&A from the remote sites and the surgeons in NCASE provided for an interactive event that proved to be the first of its kind, with this level of complexity, for Northwestern and AAOS.
Below, you can see the videoconference component on the left, while on the right is a 30 Mb/s HD stream originating from NCASE to each of the sites with the help of NUIT iCair coordinating the technology and tech support for the stream. Attendance was moderate at each site, and we’ve learned a lot this week, particularly today, on how this could be improved. All in all, it was a difficult and satisfying event which yielded positive results and feedback from the participants and event organizers.
