title: 3D medical collaboration technology to enhance emergency healthcare.
abstract: Two-dimensional (2D) videoconferencing has been explored widely in the past 15-20 years to support collaboration in healthcare. Two issues that arise in most evaluations of 2D videoconferencing in telemedicine are the difficulty obtaining optimal camera views and poor depth perception. To address these problems, we are exploring the use of a small array of cameras to reconstruct dynamic three-dimensional (3D) views of a remote environment and of events taking place within. The 3D views could be sent across wired or wireless networks to remote healthcare professionals equipped with fixed displays or with mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs). The remote professionals' viewpoints could be specified manually or automatically (continuously) via user head or PDA tracking, giving the remote viewers head-slaved or hand-slaved virtual cameras for monoscopic or stereoscopic viewing of the dynamic reconstructions. We call this idea remote 3D medical collaboration. In this article we motivate and explain the vision for 3D medical collaboration technology; we describe the relevant computer vision, computer graphics, display, and networking research; we present a proof-of-concept prototype system; and we present evaluation results supporting the general hypothesis that 3D remote medical collaboration technology could offer benefits over conventional 2D videoconferencing in emergency healthcare.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175, USA. welch@cs.unc.edu
authors.forename: Gregory F
authors.initials: GF
authors.lastname: Welch
authors.forename: Diane H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Sonnenwald
authors.forename: Henry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fuchs
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cairns
authors.forename: Ketan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mayer-Patel
authors.forename: Hanna M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Söderholm
authors.forename: Ruigang
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Andrei
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: State
authors.forename: Herman
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Towles
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ilie
authors.forename: Manoj K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Ampalam
authors.forename: Srinivas
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Krishnan
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Noel
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Noland
authors.forename: James E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Manning