Surgical telemedicine has emerged as a promising answer to the increasing needs of everyday surgical collaboration and in situ education. The implicit desire is to allow a remote surgeon to see the body as the local surgeon does in order to engage in shared decision-making or instruction. With this talk I take a step back by discussing the productive and cross-referential nature of surgical practice and image use. I discuss how it is not simply a case of transferring recorded video, but rather a new practice is instantiated in creating a view of the body for the remote surgeon. In order to investigate these practices for capturing and using video, I deployed a head-mounted video camera (via the Google Glass) in six transplant organ recovery assessments. Drawing on observations and analysis of the video artifacts, I examine how the transmitting surgeon crafts a view for the remote surgeon in order to facilitate the co-construction of knowledge and shared decision making. I use these findings to discuss further design directions for video use in surgical telemedicine.
Helena Mentis, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC. Her research contributes to the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and health informatics. She investigates how images and visualizations play a part in medical collaboration and care, particularly with regards to how both professionals and layman perceive information through images. Before UMBC, she was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at Microsoft Research Cambridge and the University of Cambridge, and was an ERCIM postdoctoral scholar at Mobile Life in Sweden. She received a PhD in Information Sciences and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2010.