First live awake brain surgery retransmission at TELECOM Nancy and Nancy University Hospital thanks to E3 project
E3 EUREKA-Celtic-Plus cross-domain Project including partners from both ICT and E-health in all project stages from definition to validation is performing the first ever live awake brain surgery.
The first live awake brain surgery was performed last Friday 26th May in Nancy-France thanks to the collaboration of the Nancy University Hospital, the Faculty of Medicine of Nancy, TELECOM Nancy engineering school , CRAN laboratory in Nancy and medVC (Poland).
Mr Oscar Chabrera E3 project Coordinator (ViLynx) indicates “E3 project aims to ease deployment of E-health solutions Everywhere and for Everybody by including the medical actors from definition to validation easing future go to market activities. Awake Surgery scenario allow surgeon to teach students to decide which parts of the brain tumors can be removed during the operation thanks to patient behaviour after brain stimulations, without affecting patients normal life”
Profesor Jean Marie Moureaux (Assistant Director of TELECOM Nancy engineering school, Researcher at CRAN laboratory, Nancy, France) indicates “Neurosurgeons perform awake brain surgery for tumors that have spread throughout the brain, specifically here, low grade gliomas. Awake brain surgery is based on real time brain stimulations and can shrink these tumors, allowing neurosurgeons to remove most of the brain tumor while preserving a high level quality of life of the patients.
Thanks to medVC telemedicine platform designed by our polish partners, the works in video coding and video quality assessment developed in E3, we have been able to design this “Awake surgery” scenario. It relies on the “live” transmission of 6 simultaneous HD and Full HD encoded video streams over the IP network on three different locations: an auditorium of TELECOM Nancy engineering school, a surgery room and an auditorium of Nancy University Hospital.”
Dr Fabien RECH, neuro-surgeon at Nancy University Hospital indicates that “The only way to really understand brain anatomy and function is to see it alive. Awake surgery provides a unique access to students to see how the brain is working. However, nowadays it is not possible to give a physical access in the operating room to every medical student. Thanks to the E3 videoconferencing solution, awake surgery can now be diffused to large group of students with a multisite and live transmission. This solution allows live interactions between students and surgeon throughout the surgery thanks to High Definition video stream, leading to a new way to teach anatomy and especially functional anatomy. This connected living anatomy gets closer to the new generation of medical students helping them to better understand a very connected organ”.
Cross domain cooperation is the only way for IT researchers to provide the solutions the e-health sector need.
