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Education
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Open heart hall pass
Videoconferencing provides OR access for student program
Oct 1, 2003
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by Don Kreski
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 Middle and high school students participating in the Museum of Science and Industry's Live... from the Heart program get an inside look at health sciences. A very inside look.
Connected via videoconferencing equipment, students can watch a coronary bypass procedure live and ask questions of surgeons and nurses as they work. The video system even allows viewers to see the inside of a patients' arteries and heart.
According to Elory Rozner, K-12 and e-learning manager for the Chicago-based museum, the program provides a "very dramatic and very moving" look into an operating room where open heart surgery is taking place. The program originates at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, IL, and uses a video system designed and installed by Media Resources of Lisle.
Cardiac Outreach
Rozner said the museum's goals for the program were threefold. "First, we wanted to create an educational program about cardiovascular health," he explained. The museum is famous for its human body exhibits, including a scale model of the heart that visitors can walk through.
Rozner's team created a program for students in grades 6 through 12 to teach the purpose and mechanics of the heart. It starts with a teacher workshop at the museum, continues with six lesson plans for participating schools, and culminates with a field trip to the museum's new e-suite classroom, where students participate in the surgical videoconference. The e-suite classroom was designed by Shen Milsom & Wilke and installed by SPL Integrated Solutions.
The second goal of the program was outreach. "Since this is a videoconferencing program," Rozner noted, "we can take the program and send it out to southern Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas -- anywhere there are people who might never come to the museum." Three classes normally participate in the weekly surgical session, one at the museum and two at more distant sites.
Career exploration was the program's third goal. While students are watching the operation, they can talk to the surgeon, the physician assistant, and circulating nurse. "They can learn about the educational background and the training of all of these people, and how they work together in the operating room," Rozner said. "They learn that it's not just the surgeon who is the star of the show, and that being a surgeon is not the only way to be involved in the health sciences."
Making this program possible from a production standpoint was the job of Brian Maksa and his team from Media Resources. They designed a video system that could be operated by just one technician, then broken down and stored when not being used for the weekly broadcasts.
The Media Resources team began by permanently mounting three Sony DXC-390 cameras in the operating room, each with AMX ABT-PT10 pan-tilt control. One is on the wall, allowing a wide view of the room or close-ups of medical staff, who provide a running commentary on the procedures. A second camera is mounted above the operating table to provide views of the patient's chest and heart, while a third is mounted above the patient's feet to shoot the surgeon harvesting veins for these bypass operations.
The team mounted one 20-inch monitor and two JBL all speakers in the OR, so doctors and nurses can see what they are transmitting and hear students at the far end. They also mounted two Shure shotgun mics to pick up ambient sound and provided two Sony wireless lavalier mics for the staff members who speak to the students. The signals from all of these devices run to a patch bay located just outside the operating room.
Built For Storage
Maksa said the real challenge was in the design of the production console that mixes the audio and video. "The problem we had was that the system could not be placed in a permanent location," he recalled. "We had to build a console that could be wheeled down the hallway for storage between sessions and that could be set up and broken down quickly. Normally, for this kind of production, you'd spend an hour or more to let your cameras come to operating temperature and to have your engineer balance everything with a waveform monitor, vectorscope, and so on. But they do not have a broadcast engineer, and they do not have the time for that kind of setup."
Instead, the solution was to base the system on a Panasonic WJ-MX50 AV mixer, rather than more traditional components. "All they have to do is plug into the patch panel, and the MX-50 automatically does the timing and adjusting for them," he said. The system gives the operator joystick controls for each of the cameras, as well as an array of transitions and special effects.
Video goes out to the museum via a Tandberg codec and can be recorded for future reference. The system also uses an Extron AV matrix switcher, TOA audio amplifier/mixer, Sony monitors, and racks from Middle Atlantic Products. The new system has worked smoothly for the Live... from the Heart sessions, and has also been called into action for additional educational conferences. Al Drachenberg, supervisor of media services for the hospital, said the system was first used in November 2002 for a rather demanding audience.
"The hospital was a test site for a new endoscopic mitral valve heart surgery," Drachenberg explained. "When the procedure was approved, we ran a cardiac symposium and filled our auditorium with high-level physicians who wanted to learn about it. We had just installed the cameras, so we were able to send a video feed to the auditorium where everyone could watch. It was a little nerve-racking to do our first video with this kind of an audience, but everything worked really well."
Both the Museum of Science and Industry and the hospital have been very pleased with the Live... from the Heart sessions. If you'd like to learn more about the program, you can visit its Web site, but unless you're a 6th through 12th grade student or teacher, you probably won't be able to see it in action.
"The program is very dramatic and very moving, but we don't want people coming in unprepared," Rozner explained. "Part of our concern is to show respect for the patients and for the process that the surgical team is going through. But mainly we need to be sure this is something educational, not sensational. It's a 2 1/2-hour operation, meant to be a comprehensive learning experience for students."
MORE INFO
AMX Corporation
(800) 222-0193
www.amx.com
Extron Electronics
(800) 633-9876
www.extron.com
JBL
(818) 894-8850
http://www.jblpro.com
Live... fron the Heart
(773) 684-9844, Ext. 2242
"http://www.livefromtheheart.org
Media Resources
(630) 493-1046
www.mymediaresources.com
Middle Atlantic Products
(800) 528-8601
http://www.middleatlantic.com
Panasonic
(800) 528-8601
http://www.panasonic.com/broadcast
Shen Milsom & Wilke
(212) 725-6800
http://www.smwinc.com
Shure
(800) 25-SHURE
http://www.shure.com
Sony
(800) 686-SONY
http://www.sony.com/government
SPL Integrated Solutions
(866) 275-4775
http://www.splis.com
Tandberg
(407) 380-7055
http://www.tandberg.com
TOA Electronics
(800) 733-7088
www.toaelectronics.com
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