Smart Codec with Telesurgery Capability

Advances in robotics, medical informatics, telecommunications, and telepresence have made telemedicine applications a reality. A subset of telemedicine, telesurgery, deals with performing remote surgical operations through high-fidelity telepresence. Telesurgery promises to provide highly specialized surgical procedures to military and civilian personnel in limited access regions. The proliferation of such systems will save lives. Unfortunately, network limitations often prevent telesurgery from being a viable option. This is especially true for remote or impoverished locations where bandwidth is in short supply. Energid Technologies proposes to develop a new Smart Codec specifically tailored to telesurgery applications. The Smart Codec uses the best existing technologies (such as H.264 compression), with new innovations designed to optimally trade off video, audio, haptic, and control fidelity as a function of bandwidth and network latency. The new codec will have the following innovations: 1) An Adaptive Focus Field (AFF)—allowing the surgeon to specify a region (or object) of interest within the scene, 2) A method of sending video, audio, haptic, and robot control data that rapidly adapts to changes in latency and bandwidth, and 3) An optimization algorithm that will trade-off fidelity between channels based on human factors data (which will be collected under this research).