UNIVERSITY TRANSMITS VIDEO FOR ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY - Toronto-based
Queen's University is using a collaborative video system to create a "virtual operating room"
with Kingston General Hospital. Students in the program will develop a suite of diagnostic
and surgical software tools to help surgeons plan and perform computer-assisted
orthopedic surgery. Using laptops and software from Avaya Inc., 30 graduate students and
professors can observe orthopedic surgeries, share documents, audio files and high-
resolution images such as x-rays, CT scans and arthroscopies. "Computer-assisted
surgery is the way of the future and will be instrumental in providing improved health care
services to Canadians," said Dr. Randy Ellis, a professor in Queens's Department of
Computing and Information Science. (Syllabus News, Resources, and Trends, 13 Nov
01) For the Syllabus Web site go to: http://www.syllabus.com/

TELEMEDICINE SURGICAL TRAINING EXPLORED AT UCLA - UCLA's School of
Medicine and Computer Motion, Inc., a developer of surgical robotic systems, will collaborate
to combine surgical robotic systems with telemedicine to allow surgeons to guide in-training
surgeons through complex surgical procedures. "This could be the world's first tele-
collaborative surgical system," said Dr. E. Carmack Holmes, chairman of the department of
surgery at UCLA. "We hope to develop a program that mimics a flight simulator to help train
future surgeons." The work is being supported by a $2 million research grant from the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program. In
September, doctors using the system performed the world's first transatlantic telesurgery
when a surgeon operating from a console in New York removed the gallbladder of a patient
in France. For more information, visit: http://www.computermotion.com (Syllabus e-News,
Resources, and Trends, 6 for Nov 01)