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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 11 | MAY 07 | |
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COVER STORY
By Bianca Nogrady
What could be achieved with unlimited bandwidth? Researchers at the CSIRO ICT Centre have been investigating.In some industries, office chat is an important part of the creative process, particularly in collaborative situations such as film post-production. But what happens when, as is becoming more common, work colleagues are separated by vast distances – one in Sydney, for example, and the other in Los Angeles – and both need to be working together at the same time? This is the sort of challenge being addressed by CSIRO researchers at the Centre for Networking Technologies in the Information Economy (CeNTIE) project, and its applications stretch from film production to research, to medical diagnostics and online commerce. The CeNTIE project is already anticipating a time, not too far away, when networking technologies will be working with limitless bandwidth, allowing a cardiologist to read the ultrasound of a patient 500 kilometres away in real time, or trainee surgeons to operate on a simulated patient under remote guidance, and where even the most sensitive financial data can be securely transmitted through any online computer. The CeNTIE project was established six years ago to explore the possibilities of a national high-performance research and engineering network, and is now a part of the CSIRO Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Centre’s Networking Technologies Laboratory. The project is supported by the Australian Government through the Advanced Networks Program of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.
Dr Dennis Cooper, eResearch theme leader at the CSIRO ICT Centre, says the underlying idea behind setting up the centre and its network was to take bandwidth out of the equation. “If you really weren’t constrained by your network bandwidth, what could you do that would make a difference to communities, business and the way people work?” Dr Cooper asks. One area where unlimited bandwidth has enormous potential is in film post-production. To explore the network’s abilities in this high-tech, highly interactive environment, CeNTIE approached Academy Award-winning digital post-production company Animal Logic – most recently feted for its work on the animated film Happy Feet. Animal Logic’s director of research and development, Guy Griffiths, says the collaboration with CeNTIE and access to the Foundation Network has provided a unique opportunity to experiment. “Rather than just say ‘make things go faster’, to me what was attractive was being able to use it to properly collaborate with Animal Logic extensions in other parts of the city and country,” Mr Griffiths says. This meant far more than simple phone calls or video-conferencing. “Workstations are very close to each other, artists can overhear conversations and can see each other so we want to replicate that, as it is an important part of the creative process, but it’s much harder in terms of audio and video,” he says. “I want to feel like they’re sitting next to me, talking to me. It needs to be ‘always on’.” The film post-production industry is a unique test case for CeNTIE, but Mr Griffiths believes that if CeNTIE can solve their problem, a large number of other industries also stand to benefit. One of those is medicine. The question CeNTIE scientists have been grappling with is how to set up a real-time critical-care consultation when your patient is a long way from a central hospital. The answer is ViCCU® – the Virtual Critical Care Unit – and it has already demonstrated its worth at Katoomba Hospital in the Blue Mountains of NSW. By transmitting high-quality video and audio, vital signs data, written notes and images, ViCCU® allows an emergency specialist at a mainstream hospital, such as Sydney’s Nepean Hospital, to supervise an emergency team at the regional Katoomba Hospital in real time. Dr Pat Cregan, clinical director of surgery at Nepean Hospital, says ViCCU® has been a great success: “It started out as a pilot project, but it has worked so well we can’t run Blue Mountains Hospital effectively without it. Plans are now being made to set up another ViCCU® at Lithgow Hospital, west of the Blue Mountains.” Because ViCCU® is active 24 hours a day, seven days a week, staff are also able to use it as an outreach program for less urgent consultations. For example, a weekly outreach clinic on infectious diseases is run through ViCCU®. By assessing a patient remotely, the physician can also judge whether the patient needs transferring. If emergency transfer to Nepean is necessary, the ViCCU® consultation means staff at the major hospital are well briefed and prepared for the patient’s arrival ahead of time. ViCCU® is now being commercialised by Telstra. A different approach has been taken in Tasmania with the Networked Cardiac Ultrasound Unit. The high incidence of heart disease in Tasmania’s north-west has led to a collaboration between CeNTIE, the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services and three Tasmanian hospitals. The aim is not only to establish a real-time consultation between a patient and several cardiologists, but also to accurately transmit cardiac ultrasound data. CeNTIE scientists have designed a trolley for the networking technology so that it can be easily moved around the intensive care unit at Burnie Regional Hospital. It presents the image on a larger screen, transmits it to cardiology specialists in other parts of the State and provides real-time interactivity between the experts. While WRON technologies are likely to improve the way existing historical data is managed, they are also delivering on projects that raise the potential for future problem-solving applications. Unlimited bandwidth also has the potential to revolutionise teaching in medicine. It is already doing so via a remote-training simulation tool that enables trainee surgeons to learn how to drill into the skull’s temporal bone region to install a cochlear implant. By connecting the unit to CeNTIE’s Foundation Network, trainees can be guided through the simulation in real time by an experienced surgeon who may be thousands of kilometres away. Dr John Zic, research director of the Networking Technologies Laboratory, says the key to adapting these techniques to suit so many industries is understanding the protocols that underpin their work. “Central to this is the view that we have to understand how people work together,” he says. “If I had to have a catch-all phrase for the laboratory, it is that we are protocol people – from human protocols involved in the tasks that they perform during their day, down to networking protocols required to transfer information, and finally down to hardware-level protocols.” To gain these insights, the CeNTIE project within the Networking Technologies Laboratory has taken the unique approach of establishing industry focus groups in health, media and enterprise systems. Feedback from these focus groups guides CeNTIE’s research every step of the way. “We are fortunate to have key people from various organisations who freely give up their own time to participate in the focus groups, and work with us in identifying real-world problems and how we at CSIRO can help them,” Dr Zic says. The enterprise systems focus group has brought together banks and Australian Government departments, with the goal of developing an extremely secure and private online collaborative environment. “The systems that we are developing will ensure that the participants will be able to know and trust each other, know that the information they exchange is strictly restricted to that exchange or session, and they know their information will not be altered, intercepted or removed,” Dr Zic says. CeNTIE’s solution is a trust extension device – a portable device that can be plugged into any computer anywhere in the world, and which immediately creates an isolated, secure and controlled environment. This device can establish an electronic contract between the collaborating parties before the session starts, that sets out agreed-upon policies for the amount of storage needed, the level of security and who has access to the storage. Previously, such an arrangement would have to be made through a third party, but CeNTIE hopes to automate the process as much as possible. “The key message we’re spreading is that effectively, any collaborative environment needs its own virtual space that contains all the conversations that are relevant to that collaboration,” Dr Zic says. He is also understandably enthusiastic about the outputs from the CeNTIE project and the Foundation Network. “We’re looking at, by 2010, actually having a system that allows people to work collaboratively, securely and privately across distances,” Dr Zic says. With strong support from focus groups, and having a milestone-driven work ethic, Dr Zic believes the CeNTIE project has a great future. For further information contact: |
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