A multimedia system for remote neurosurgical monitoring

Neurophysiological intraoperative monitoring (IOM) is an important tool aimed at reducing iatrogenic injury to the central nervous system during complex surgical procedures. We utilize multimedia techniques involving digital video to perform remote IOM. A video camera mounted on a microscope records the same surgical scene as the one observed by the neurosurgeon. The recorded video along with a variety of physiological data are processed, compressed, and transmitted through networks to be monitored by neurophysiologists at remote sites. In order to reduce bandwidth without degenerating video quality in critical areas of the surgical field, we utilized a novel method based on the wavelet transform to decompose each video frame into subframes and encode them in different resolutions. Our experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this method.