We kicked off our survey of the emerging telepresence industry with a trip to the west coast to meet with the vendors located on that side of the country and see and experience their solutions first-hand. Our first stop was Barrow Neurological Institute on January 23rd for the public unveiling of the MedPresence Conference Room. The MedPresence Conference Room is a telepresence solution for surgical education, physician consultations, case reviews, and the development of surgical tools and techniques. At the unveiling we were able to observe both a spinal cord surgery and a brain surgery in a classroom setting where participants feel as if they are in the neurosurgical operating room. Unlike the traditional telemedicine view of just the "guts" the MedPresence Conference Room allows surgical residents, peer physicians, and medical technology vendors/partners to ability to view all aspects of a given operation including what equipment is being used, the pace and demenor of the participants, and the detailed imagery from the operating microscope and medical informatics. The surgeon has full interaction with the remote participants during an operation.

The system also includes a mobile unit that can be easily transported to smaller medical facilities, rural hospitals, and surgical conferences around the world. Expect to see the world-class neurosurgeons at Barrow sharing their knowledge globally in 2006.

Since telepresence is an experience we are experimenting with video to better convey the power of the medium to the uninitiated. We created our first video short from the unveiling. It can be found Here.

The file is under 5MBs and can be downloaded and e-mailed Here.

We would like to thank Drs. Robert Spetzler, Stephen Papadopoulos, and Shahram "Shez" Partovi for being generous with their time for our interviews and allowing us to document the interaction with the remote sites from their operating room. It was a privilege and very much appreciated!

The background music is All Things to All Men from The Cinematic Orchestra from their most excellent album EveryDay available on the Ninja Tune Label

We will be putting additional videos on-line in about a month. HPL Guru and documentarian Dave Hanshaw will, unfortunately, be spending the remainder of February at Air Hollywood in California shooting a movie about zombies that take over a 747 in flight. Every day is an adventure at the Lab... :-) HSL