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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 2 Feb 05 | |
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IT NETWORKS
High-Speed Skill Online
By Jack Sears
Doctors have a new virtual bedside manner. It is 10 pm at Katoomba Hospital, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. A two-year-old child, rushed in after a car accident, is screaming. Determining the cause of the trauma is being hampered by severe lacerations. They turn to the Virtual Critical Care Unit (ViCCU™) at the end of the child’s bed. Through the camera on ViCCU™, a specialist doctor at the Nepean Hospital in Penrith, 50 kilometres away, can see the child with the clarity of a digital TV. He can check the child’s pallor, whether the veins are distended, talk to the Katoomba staff as if they are in the same room, and see in separate windows on the TV screen the results of their preliminary tests. By being able to view the child, talk to the staff, as well as study the test results, the doctor realises the child is suffering severe burns – not immediately obvious because of the lacerated skin. Treatment is promptly handed over to the Children’s Hospital burns team. Monique Murphy, a Nepean-based emergency care nurse, says the treatment probably saved the child’s life. 'How do you measure the value of that?' she says. ViCCU™ is one example of how high-speed internet-based networks can change lives. The unit and the high-speed network responsible for its visual and audio clarity were built by the Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE), a joint initiative of the Department of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) and the CSIRO Information and Communications Technology Centre.
CeNTIE’s chief executive, Dr Dean Economou, says: 'In the 1980s, Australia was a leader in internet technology. By the mid-90s, we had fallen behind.' To help Australia catch up, Dr Economou proposed to focus CeNTIE’s research efforts on applying high-speed networks to projects that help the community and industry. CeNTIE focusses on four areas: health, media, tertiary education and business. Twelve months ago, before ViCCU™, hospital staff consulted doctors by phone. Because it is remote, Katoomba hospital finds it hard to employ enough doctors; ViCCU™ provides virtual access to doctors in Penrith 24 hours a day. Ms Murphy, a telehealth clinical nurse consultant employed by Wentworth Area Health Service, is now evaluating the results of the ViCCU™ project, in conjunction with the University of New South Wales. She says better decisions about transferring patients are one big benefit. Sometimes patients are too unstable to transfer; sometimes they are better managed under specialist advice in Katoomba. If patients are to be transferred, staff at the receiving hospital are better prepared. Getting transfers right saves money and lives. Katoomba staff are also more confident and working better as a team with ViCCU™. 'At first, staff did not like being on camera', Ms Murphy says. 'Now, they say they can’t work without it.' All up, CeNTIE has spent $44 million over three years developing the national high-speed network and applications to run on it. ViCCU™ is just one project. Others include a networked virtual surgical training theatre, in which students operate on a virtual body that they can both see and feel (using haptic – virtual touch – technology) under guidance from experienced surgeons who may be in the next room or in another country. The technology has also been used to establish a movie post-production network that allows editors and directors from different cities to collaborate on visual effects. CeNTIE consults with industry experts. 'We talk with groups of experts about what is possible and listen to their needs', Dr Economou says. 'Between us, we develop specific applications.' In establishing CeNTIE, about $30 million in cash and kind came from Canadian technology company Nortel Networks, the telecommunications company IP 1 (since bought by Telstra), and various universities. DCITA contributed $14 million. Recently, CeNTIE received another three years funding – $10 million from government and $15 million from other partners. The next step is to increase broadband speed to households and businesses by 50 times. Dr Economou says: 'In Japan, Korea, Scandinavia and Holland, you can buy 20 megabits per second for the same price we pay for 256 kilobits in Australia.'
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CeNTIE’s
network is 20,000 times faster than broadband. It runs on dedicated strands
of optical fibre cable in Perth, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, and
leased cables between the states.
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