QStar Gives Surgeons Unprecedented Access To Surgery Video Archives

Recording, cataloging, and archiving video for each surgical procedure created a tremendous burden for the Institute. The original process consisted of manually recording surgeries, first to VHS cassettes and later to DVDs. Continuing with this archival system would have forced the hospital to dedicate two rooms and from one to three full-time staff members to manage the storage. Retrieving footage was a time-consuming process and hindered the Institute's ability to conduct research effectively. As Dr. Alok Shrivastava, MD, MCh (Urology) at VUI explained, "When developing a new procedure such as robotic prostatectomy, it's critical to review past operations, to see what you did and how you can improve. With our old system of manually cataloging and archiving video, we simply could not research the way we wanted."

The Vattikuti Urology Institute selected the ProxSys™ Media Asset Management solution from Focus Enhancements to streamline the tasks of recording and storing video for each robotic prostatectomy procedure performed at the hospital. ProxSys replaces the need to manually manage volumes of dispersed videotapes and enables terabytes of low- and high resolution video to be managed from a simple Web browser interface.

In the operating room, a team member uses a bar-code reader and enters key information, including date, patient's name, and surgery type. Recorded footage is sent directly from their Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci® minimally invasive robotic surgical system to the Prox-Sys ingest workstation, where it is automatically indexed according to bar-coded metadata fields. Files are stored electronically in the ProxSys Media Server. A user-friendly, browser-based interface lets surgeons or other authorized individuals browse files or quickly locate a particular file based on patient's name, surgery date, and so on. Currently, VUI has one ingest station; however, they plan to add a second ingest station to support their other robotic operating room. The ProxSys Media Server can expand to support up to 10 ingest stations, and the system can be further scaled to meet any future needs of the Institute.

QStar HSM software is used to manage the video archives. Recent studies are stored on the ProxSys server, while any study over six-months is stored in the QStar archive on a Plasmon UDO library. QStar provides ProxSys with seamless access to Plasmon UDO large scale archive hardware and facilitates a link between the ProxSys Media Sever and the archive hardware. Files are stored on primary disk space for six-months and then moved to the UDO storage library for the reminder of their data lifecycle via the QStar software. QStar HSM provides seamless access to the physical archive location where the studies are stored for long-term retention, either on or off-line, and provides disk like fast access to all studies managed by the solution. This way, VUI can maintain data retention requirements on revision secure long-term storage media, and also provide the VUI team with fast access to study information when needed in an organized manner based on the searching and indexing features of the ProxSys solution. UDO technology was selected for three reasons -- its speed of retrieval, the permanence and longevity of the media and its ability to scale as the systems grows and the studies increase in number and size.