Agreed, that many articles here are indeed based on press releases, though I expect (I hope not unreasonably) those press releases to be at least looked at and vetted for technical rigor and not just passed along as fact.
Also agreed, that encouraging innovation and inquistiveness is a Good Thing. Having one's expectations raised by overenthusiastic and uncritical PR is, however, a waste of valuable engineering time.
We'll just have to disagree on whether this is "good article."
AJ2X - I'm not getting you wrong at all. I definitely get what you're saying. It's unfortunate that you've labeled my post a "shill comment". I prefer positive and respectful.
I stand by my comment that the article is a good one. What Charles wrote is sound. Many articles here are based on press releases. Each also gives a little more information to provide a bigger picture and encourage inquisitiveness. That's a good thing.
Yes, surgeries are pretty much entirely wired. Hospitals are conservative entities, and adopt new technology like wireless slowly and carefully -- intereference between devices can mean life or death. Video particularly is mostly copper based, since any loss of resolution (there's that word again) or time delay between a surgeon's movements and the picture on the monitor is unacceptable, both of which can occur with wireless video as it usually is implemented today.
Additionally, many (most?) video systems in ORs are on mobile carts, completely independent of any servers or permanently-installed monitors. A camera, light source, recorder/printer and monitor all reside together in a cart to be moved rapidly from OR to OR as needed. A single power cable is plugged in, and it's ready to use. A second, coax video, cable could extend to a built-in video system if wider viewing or monitoring is required. Very little compelling need for wireless links.
I did note the "if" in your statement, which is a throwaway word here to emphasize the statement about "exponentially better picture". Nowhere in the article is "exponentially" used, so it looked to me like you were trying to claim even more amazing things for this product. It looked like a shill comment to me, which I don't think was your intention.
Don't get me wrong -- this irtem from Omron is no doubt a useful device, and I can see places where it might be productively used. But the claim that "Digital signals typically travelled over copper-based cables, and resolution was lost in the process" is just not accurate. Technically inaccurate statements and publicity flack do not make a "good article."
Is surgical video all wired? That would seem to be the only application for this device. Although I assume that going wireless would compound the problem.
NadineJ -- This device, inserted in a digital video transmission system, cannot deliver any improvement in video resolution. The resolution is set by the camera -- anything added to it can only degrade the resolution or at best maintain it.
Long distance digital video transmission by optical fibers (and other means) is pretty well-established and successful, and has and will work well for telesurgery and robotics.
dbarto; You are correct about HDMI having signal-quality degradation over distance in wire, as all signals do without repeaters or equalizers of some sort. Optical transmission is better at that sort of thing, though it needs repeaters also. But the claims for this optical device were about resolution improvements, and it cannot deliver that.
Incidentally, HDMI is not common in laparoscopic camera-aided surgery -- it's mostly HD-SDI in the US and DVI-D in Europe. And the explosive-gas argument is a non-issue: ORs have long been full of electronic equipment operating at much higher voltages and powers than are present in any video transmission method.
Thanks for this, Chuck, this is an exciting development in vision technology. Interesting that the technology comes from Omron; they make a lot more than just imaging equipment.
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