India Doctors Watch U.S. 3-D Surgery Via Satellite

Shades of the 1950s and “The Creature from the Black Lagoon!” Next Tuesday, a real-time, 3-D transmission of a surgical procedure will be broadcast via satellite from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit to a medical meeting in Mumbai, India. The robotic prostatectomy operation will be transmitted from the hospital by fiber-optic cable to Singapore, where it then will be beamed via satellite to India, where the signal will be fed to a large screen at a medical convention and viewed by 1,500 physicians wearing special 3-D glasses.

The medical meeting is the World Congress of Endo-Urology, and the operation will be shown as a teaching tool for urologists. The broadcast required developing new transmission standards, and it will be the first time ever that an operation has been transmitted across the globe in 3-D, organizers said.

The special, one-of-a-kind operating room at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit was designed and built with 3-D technology in mind, and it is enhanced by two 60-in.-by-80-in. flat projection screens, advanced lighting, and a data monitoring and intercom system. The entire surgical team wears special polarized glasses during surgery. The benefit of everyone seeing in 3-D is they are all synchronized.