Advanced Tele-Medicine at CESNET Conference 2008

Prague / In cooperation with a group of advanced Asian Internet networks the CESNET academic association is organizing a unique presentation tomorrow, focusing on the topic of tele-medicine. The presentation will be a part of the professional conference called CESNET Conference 2008, organized by the association this Thursday and Friday in premises of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University.

The key point of the presentation, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. tomorrow, will be a video conference transferring live footage of endoscopic and radiologic operations from medical workplaces in Japan and Taiwan to Europe. The transfer will be done in the full NTSC resolution, which should eliminate any image distortions. Such transfer quality allows long-distance remote diagnostics.

During this event, seven medical workplaces will be connected by means of the video conference: three in Asia, two of which in Japan and one in Taiwan, and four in Europe – one in Italy, one in Spain and two in the Czech Republic. In the Czech Republic, the following workplaces will participate: Central Military Hospital in Prague and Krajská zdravotní, a. s. – Masaryk Hospital in Ústí nad Labem. Experts can watch the entire teleconference in auditoriums of these medical facilities.

The part of the conference dedicated to medicine will be opened with a lecture of Prof. Shui Shimitzu from the University Hospital in Kyushu, Japan. In a presentation lasting about 30 minutes, Prof. Shimitzu will cover his hospital's experience with tele-medicine. During the videoconference there will be two more lectures transferred. The first will be presented by Dr. Muto from the University of Kyoto, discussing utilization of NBI (Narrow Band Imaging – see below) for detecting early pharynx and fauces cancer. The second presenter will be Dr. Chen-Shuan Chun from the National Taiwan University, concentrating on specific utilization of NBI in an unusual case of pancreatic disease in a 57-year woman.

Based on the live footage transferred within the video conference, the physicians will be able to perform remote diagnostics of the presented cases, exchanging opinions with fellow colleagues in a subsequent tele-discussion.

The tele-medicine presentation is just one part of the two-day conference. CESNET is organizing the second year of the conference today; the first meeting took place in Prague two years ago. Participation in this year's conference was promised not only by experts from Europe but also from the USA, Japan and Taiwan.

Key topics of the CESNET Conference 2008:
security – aspect and principles of network, grid and general e-infrastructure security;
middleware – software components interconnecting extensive complex distributed systems;
virtualization – virtual networks, computing platforms, and data warehouse infrastructures.

The conference will be opened on Thursday 25 September at 10:00 a.m. by the vice chairman of the Science and Research Board of the government of the Czech Republic, Miroslava Kopicová. The event will continue with a two-day set of lectures presented by Czech and foreign experts.

The CESNET association will provide Internet streaming from the conference, available at the event website, which also offers the complete conference program and other details: http://www.ces.net/events/2008/conference/.

NBI (Narrow Band Imaging) improves the visibility of capillaries and other tiny structures on the mucosa surface. As a result of biological tissue characteristics, the narrow-band light is absorbed by the mucosa and dispersed in a way different from white light. This emphasizes the contrast between small blood vessels and normal tissue as well as microscopic structures in the upper mucosa layers.

The CESNET association was founded by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The association is currently financed mainly from the resources of the governmental Committee for Research and Education and the resources of the members of the association. The association deals with the research and development of information and communication technologies, building and developing the national gigabit optical network, CESNET2, designed for research and educational purposes. With its research activities and accomplishments, the CESNET association can represent the Czech Republic in the pan-European GÉANT2 network construction project as well as other international projects. In addition, the association deals with utilization of high-speed networks for multimedia data sharing, both synchronous in the form of video conferences and shared applications, and asynchronous, in the form of streaming.