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An overview of current applications of the result
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AMIE at St. James's Hospital
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AMIE was demonstrated in operational use in a pilot installation at the department of cardiology of St. James's Hospital in Dublin, Ireland's largest hospital and also a major teaching hospital. |
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A multimedia node of the pilot system at St. James's hospital
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Cardiac patients may undergo a range of diagnostic examinations including Angiography, Echocardiography, Nuclear Medicine, X-ray, ECG and Blood Pressure Measurement. Each of these data types is acquired on dedicated equipment with specific requirements in terms of resolution, frame rate and sequence length. A Cardiac Case Conference takes place in the hospital on a weekly basis to discuss the treatment and management of selected Cardiac patients. Angiography images, the principal diagnostic aid, are reviewed in cine-film format at the conferences with patient notes available. Other data types are not typically exhibited due to the incompatibility of display devices and storage media. |
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The AMIE Pilot (movie)
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For AMIE, the seminar theatre was equipped with cameras, microphones, computer, display projector and radio base station, plus several pen computers used as control pads and note pads. The AMIE demonstrator facilitates the integrated display of all the multimedia data types on one unified system; functionality is consistent, and is some cases superior, to that available on traditional equipment. This functionality includes image sequence play at user adjustable speeds, image freeze and image enhancement. All control functions can be performed by the presenter via the pen computer, while the other participants can annotate the documents being presented for later review. |
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AMIE: a photographic essay (posters)
AMIE field trial report (paper)
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The meeting normally lasts for one or two hours and covers approximately 20 cases, which gives about 5 minutes per patient, possibly less. Speed is thus essential and it has been noted that, before AMIE, the doctors found it too time-consuming to switch back and forth between the various presentation aids (cine-film projector, videotape player, transparency projector, whiteboard, X-ray light box etc) and, in the majority of cases, they ended up showing only the angiograms (the 'gold' standard in the detection of coronary artery disease). AMIE, which integrates all those media in the same system and makes them accessible via a uniform interface, allows the doctors to easily review many modalities simultaneously per patient, so much so that they have to discipline themselves to avoid discussing these patients in much greater detail than their tight schedule allows. |
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Audio and video networked peripherals in the Coronary Care unit
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A camera, microphone and workstation are also present at the Coronary Care Unit elsewhere in the hospital. This allows other doctors to take part in the conference from the remote site with a bidirectional video telephony link, simultaneous view of the presented data and shared cursor to allow control and manipulation of the displayed data. |
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Medusa at ORL (movie)
Medusa (poster)
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Desktop multimedia at ORLThe largest deployed Medusa installation can be found at ORL in Cambridge, UK, where a multimedia network of about 25 user locations, each with up to four cameras and four microphones, is deployed both within the building and in two neighbouring university departments, the Computer Laboratory and the Engineering Department. These site are interconnected with an ATM networking infrastructure over a combination of 155Mb fibre optic, 100Mb coaxial and 25Mb twisted-pair cabling. As well as being used daily as a convenient deployed communications system, it is used by researchers as a testbed for further work and experimentation into networked multimedia. Many applications are enhanced by Medusa's capability of forwarding multimedia streams to analyser programs as well as to humans: the multi-camera video phone, for example, has an optional digital assistant that continuously highlights the video stream with the most activity and the microphone picking up the loudest signal (together with some hysteresis to avoid continuous switching). Other applications beside the video phone include: multi-stream video mail; remote access to an audio/video server with multi-CDs, VCRs and TV and radio feeds; timed recording of TV news and facilities to browse the archive; a continuously refreshed panoramic view of Cambridge available through the World Wide Web; and many others of a more experimental nature involving various forms of automatic feature extraction.
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Video Mail Retrieval (movie)
Video Mail and Broadcast News Retrieval (posters)
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Video Mail RetrievalAn interesting development based on the Medusa hardware and software core has been pursued by ORL in a three-year joint project with the University of Cambridge's Engineering Department and Computer Laboratory. The Video Mail Retrieval (VMR) project concentrates on finding multimedia messages in a vast archive such as a user's personal video mail collection. Unlike textual e-mail, which can be read one or two orders of magnitude faster than it can be written, multimedia mail is very time-consuming to review: therefore, good search and retrieval facilities become vital. VMR uses speech recognition to convert the sound track of each message to a lattice of "phones" and then uses specialized indexing techniques for searching the corpus of messages for best matches with the target words. The technology has also been successfully applied to the retrieval of broadcast news items from a large archive.
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