Case Study · Medical / Education

Seoul National University Hospital: Real-Time 3D Endoscopic Video Streaming for Surgical Training

3D endoscope video, live outside the operating room

Seoul National University Hospital built an environment in which the operating room's 3D endoscope feed can be watched on training-room monitors with exactly the same depth, and no glasses. A 32-inch glasses-free 3D display and GPU-based ultra-low-latency streaming deliver the surgeon's sense of space and depth to trainees as it is.

As 3D endoscopic surgery becomes more common, surgical training increasingly needs an environment that conveys the same sense of space and depth the surgeon sees. Many existing 3D training setups, however, require special 3D glasses, which makes them inconvenient to use. 3D display equipment suited to medical education is also expensive and in limited supply, so it has often been hard to bring into real training environments.

In 3D endoscopic surgery the surgeon reads tissue depth from the two images a stereo camera sends, and moves instruments accordingly. Send that video to a training room on a flat monitor and the depth is gone: trainees cannot tell from the image alone why the surgeon approached at that angle. 3D glasses solve this, but in a training room where many people watch for long periods, managing glasses and the fatigue of wearing them become another burden.

A training environment has one more requirement: it has to support several units, not one. Dedicated medical 3D equipment is costly, so it tends to stop at one or two units, and utilization per trainee stays low. That is why Seoul National University Hospital looked at a monitor-based glasses-free 3D system.

Seoul National University Hospital introduced MOPIC's glasses-free 3D display system and real-time 3D video playback software at its surgical simulation center. The existing 3D endoscope stays as it is; MOPIC's components sit on the path its output video takes to the training-room monitors.

How it fits together

SBS is a 3D video format that places the left- and right-eye images side by side in one frame; most 3D endoscopes and 3D cameras output it. Because MOPIC's playback software takes this format as is and turns it into glasses-free 3D, the hospital never touches endoscope equipment or video settings. For the same reason, training materials produced in SBS play on the same monitors with no conversion.

Low streaming latency matters because training happens live. If the training-room picture visibly lags the OR, the surgeon's commentary and the image drift apart, and teaching that follows the flow of surgery with live questions becomes difficult. GPU-based processing keeps that delay to a minimum so the OR and the training room see the same moment.

Watch the video

Better understanding in surgical training

Trainees understand anatomical structures and surgical procedures more intuitively in a stereoscopic environment close to real surgery.

A cost-effective 3D training environment

By using a monitor-based glasses-free 3D system instead of dedicated 3D equipment, the hospital can install several displays in the training environment, building a cost-effective 3D training setup.

An expanded digital medical-education environment

Introducing a glasses-free 3D surgical training system has further strengthened the hospital's digital medical-education environment.

Beyond surgical training, the same structure applies wherever the output of 3D imaging equipment has to be shown to several people.