Screen recording of hospital theatre camera

[Mark Suszko]

The surgical cameras don’t always work in a TV-compatible system, so you either shoot off the monitor for that system, or you see if the system can feed out to a scan converter, which you then feed into a recorder. Or, you ask if the system records internally, to hard drive or DVD, then you get a copy in whatever codec it uses, and trans-code from that in post.

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

I am not sure if you already have the permission to record from any source.

All hospital data are confidential material of the Hospital authorities. If the patient and the authorities don’t have objection to part with it data, you can take their consent to hire / borrow / purchase from them.

If you have the permissions –

The data is usually recorded in a media – Usually of high quality.

To record from the screen, there may at least be a composite out, a S video out. I have not seen a HDMI or SDI out yet on such equipment

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[Micah Wolf]

I work for a large hospital system and have filmed in the operating room a few times. Santanu is correct about needing permission from the patient and the hospital about using footage from a surgery. All of these rules fall under HIPPA laws in the United States. Now to your question.

Depending on what the surgery is and how the operating room is set up there are a few ways of getting this type of footage. Scopes are often used these days during surgery and the feed is high resolution. Often these types scopes can be recorded and accessed later in whichever codec it was recorded. Another way, like suggested is to film the screen that the doctors are viewing. In situations where scopes are being used there are often many monitors with the same image.

My personal favorite way of getting the footage is to be in the OR filming and moving around the subject. Obviously you have to stay out of the sterile area but with a good zoom you can really get close to the action.

Lastly many new operating rooms have cameras built into their surgical operating lights. Though I have never accessed these cameras I believe them to be recorded in HiDef to a computer.

Best of luck,
Micah

[John Shand]

Hi all,
Thanks you so much for the comments. We actually had two options in the end. We bought a HDMI capture device (used for recording xbox games etc) and we bough some USB sticks as we weren’t sure how the set up would work best.
Luckily the cameras the surgeons used recorded directly to their own harddrive system, we could then load the footage to our harddrive after. This was useful as there were three endoscopic cameras at once.

You could use the game capture HDMI device too. It just plugs into the HDMI out or dvi out.

Really great experience!