Olympus KeyMed contacted Stream7 to assist with the ERCP Masterclass held at St James’ Hospital in Leeds. Olympus required a robust solution to transmit audio and video from the Endoscopy suite located on the ground floor to a lecture theatre seven stories up. The link was required to transmit Full HD quality images from a camera, plus digital video feeds from an Xray machine and endoscope, along with a two-way audio link to allow a live Q&A session to take place.
Stream7 decided that this project would be ideal to utilise their Newtec Tricasters and the new Newtec NDI protocol which allows multiple audio and video streams to be sent across a standard Gigabit network. We located a Tricaster 460 live production unit in the Endoscopy Suite and used it to create compositions of the video from our live camera and the feeds from the medical equipment, along with the audio from the consultant’s wireless microphone. This was sent over NDI to another tricaster unit located in the lecture theatre, where our High Contrast HD projector displayed the imagery for the delegates. Multiple channels of audio allowed for the Consultant to describe his technique to the delegates, and the chairman to ask questions back from the Lecture Theatre.
Stream7 also used NDI to allow technical communications between crew at both locations.
The live link was a great success and we received very positive feedback from both the delegates and Olympus Keymed. The NDI system allowed us to create full HD quality video links using a venue’s existing Gigabit Network, without the need to install additional SDI infrastructure which would be cost prohibitive.
We hope to use this system at many other hospitals to allow students and medical professionals a front row view of medical procedures.
