Remote 3d medical consultation

Two-dimensional (2D) video-based telemedical consultation has been explored widely in the past 15-20 years. Two issues that seem to arise in most relevant case studies are the difficulty associated with obtaining the desired 2D camera views, and poor depth perception. To address these problems we are exploring the use of a small array of cameras to synthesize a spatially continuous range of dynamic three-dimensional (3D) views of a remote environment and events. The 3D views can be sent across wired or wireless networks to remote viewers with fixed displays or mobile devices such as a personal digital assistant (PDA). The viewpoints could be specified manually or automatically via user head or PDA tracking, giving the remote viewer virtual head- or hand-slaved (PDA-based) remote cameras for mono or stereo viewing. We call this idea remote 3D medical consultation (3DMC). In this article we motivate and explain the vision for 3D medical consultation; we describe the relevant computer vision/graphics, display, and networking research; we present a proof-of-concept prototype system; and we present some early experimental results supporting the general hypothesis that 3D remote medical consultation could offer benefits over conventional 2D televideo.