HaiVision's MAKO-HD Provides Speed, Reliability Key To CRAN Telesurgery Project

HaiVision Systems, a leading vendor of high-definition (HD) H.264 telepresence codecs, has announced that its hai1000 codec systems, equipped with the exceptionally low-latency MAKO-HD H.264 codec, are being used by France's CRAN (Research Center for Automatic Control) to support the study of robot-assisted telesurgery.
Implemented as part of the RALTT (Robotic Assisted Laparoscopic Telementoring and Telesurgery) project at the hospital of Nancy-Brabois, HaiVision's advanced H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression technology enables reliable low-latency of video over a VPN linking two test sites.
Nedia Nouri, a CRAN doctoral student and member of the RALTT project team, said: "The success of the RALTT project hinges on our ability to achieve high standard for video compression and transmission, as these principal technology elements are critical to the surgeon's work and, ultimately, the health of the patient. Telesurgery holds enormous potential for medical facilities and their patients and HaiVision's advanced encoding technology is proving to be a key enabler in making this exciting model a reality."
The CRAN RALTT project was created to study the feasibility of surgical operation techniques relying on assisted robots (da Vinci robots from Intuitive Surgical) to enable remote surgery with the doctor and patient at two different locations. The goal of the project is to define subjective tolerance limits of use.
HaiVision's advanced MAKO-HD provides surgeons with very fast and reliable video feedback over a long-distance link. A delay of 1 or 2 seconds is not acceptable for surgical applications, so the MAKO-HD's ability to reduce latency below 100 ms is critical to the success of CRAN's tests.
Victor Mauroy, Applications Engineer for Equipments Scientifiques, which is providing technical support for RALTT, said: "Most of the technological issues in this project relate to encoding and transmission latencies, and our goal is to maintain the best picture quality with the shortest delays. We have compared many video encoders and found that HaiVision products offer the best combination of performance, low latency, and reasonable prices. The company has a reputation of providing the fastest HD video encoders ever, and the hai1000 and MAKO-HD correspond to our needs perfectly. They are easy to use. and their performance has been outstanding."
The hai1000 telepresence codec system delivers the highly efficient MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video compression standard at unsurpassed levels, enabling communication of high-resolution HD (up to 1080p) or SD video and super wideband audio across IP networks at bandwidths anywhere from 256 kbps to 10 Mbps. The MAKO-HD "zero latency" codec from HaiVision is the highest-performance H.264 codec available for HD, supporting up to 1080p resolution and an imperceptible 70 millisecond end-to-end latency.
Further information is available at: www.haivision.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)