NIH Develops Telesynergy Multimedia Telemedicine Workstation

The NIH Center for Information Technology (CIT), Bethesda, Md., has developed the TELESYNERGY Medical Consultation WorkStation to equip the NIH Clinical Center with a multimedia medical imaging workstation integrated with a high-performance telemedicine communications system. The workstation facilitates both on- and off-campus collaboration between NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) researchers and members of the NCI Partnerships in Science program. The system will be used by the NCI to develop new cancer therapies with hospitals in the U.S. and abroad.

Challenge

While collaborators in the same room could point at details of medical images using ball point pens or fingers, videoconference collaborators needed something more. Voice commands telling doctors to look at "the dark spot in the upper left corner," weren't specific enough for the accuracy their profession demanded.

Solution

A Pointmaker PVI-44 compact video marker with digitizing tablet was installed within the TELESYNERGY System at the NIH hub and member sites so that collaborators could draw in color over a variety of medical video images. The S-Video images that are annotated with the Pointmaker include biopsies from a microscope, live patient images using an exam camera, VCR images, and Polaroid pictures or gross tissue using a document imager. The Pointmaker can also annotate graphs or data from patient charts -- and can even annotate live ultrasound images.

Results

Developers of the $200K+ workstation say that the marking capability of the Pointmaker unlocked the power of all of the other equipment, making the system much more interactive and valuable to collaborators.


For more information, call Boeckeler Instruments, Inc. at (800)552-2262 or (520)745-0001.

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