Uni’s £1.5m media lab pioneering 3D patient treatment on the net (From Gazette)

Uni’s £1.5m media lab pioneering 3D patient treatment on the net

10:00am Thursday 12th November 2009

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TECHNOLOGY being developed in Colchester will allow medics to watch crystal clear 3D images of surgical operations taking place thousands of miles away.

Essex University scientists are “reinventing the internet” as they strive to find methods of transmitting super-sharp pictures around the globe with no time delay.

To help with their quest, they have installed a £1.5million media lab, capable of screening films in the most advanced formats invented.

Set for launch tomorrow, it can show footage of a quality 16 times clearer than High Definition, the best standard available for home TV sets.

Professor Dimitra Simeonidou, who manages the new lab, said: “We need new tools and different methods in order to transmit these new technologies.

“Aside from the lab itself, we have £6.5million of funding to link it up with other super-computers around the country and in Europe, which gives us a very good foundation for collaboration.”

The hope is that, by developing systems advanced enough to transmit “ultra-HD” and other technologies, researchers in the uni’s school of computer science and electronic engineering can help revolutionise how medicine is practiced.

The aim os for expert UK surgeons to be able to see a 3D picture of a patient and give advice as a colleague operates upon them in Chicago, Paris or Tokyo.

Another application is the distribution of complex data which would be too much for the internet to handle.

Systems already developed by the university and its partners are to be used by researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider project in Switzerland, the multi-billion pound attempt to recreate the Big Bang.

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