Interactive telemedicine in the operating theatre of the future.

An experimental stereoscopic system has been established in the Robert-Rössle-Klinik, including four operating theatres and the surgical research unit OP 2000. The system allows local three-dimensional image acquisition, local stereoscopic video display, in-house stereoscopic video transmission and stereoscopic links to external partners. The goal is to make high-quality patient data available in a medical centre or over a collaborative network of medical experts. In future the requirements of teleconsultation in terms of image quality and bandwidth will be heterogeneous. A sophisticated medical telecommunication system for second opinions is needed that can take advantage of intelligent compression approaches (e.g. wavelet compression) to archive, to search for image content and to transmit medical data such as images.