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Hand held digital camera for digital video recording in ophthalmic surgery

2006; Medknow; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4103/0301-4738.27079

1998-3689

Ankur Sinha, Rohit Saxena, HarinderSingh Sethi, Kiran Turaka,

Surgical Simulation and Training

Dear Editor, We read with great interest, the article by Raju et al.,1 “Digital video- recording and archiving in ophthalmic surgery”. We agree with the authors about the definite advantage of the digital video- recording system over analog recorders and such a shift by most ophthalmic surgeons is essential. Superiority of quality of digital video-recording and ease in video-editing using various software, has been comprehensively covered. We have both digital and analog video-recorders at our center. Although the article was comprehensive, we would like to add about our experience in low cost, high quality video and ′still photography′, which may be of importance for non- institutional ophthalmic surgeons. We have used a hand held digital camera for intraoperative video- recording and have found the recorded video to be of reasonably good quality, using “Canon Powershot A75”.2 The assistant can hold the digital camera in front of the eye piece of the side- viewing system of the routine operating microscope and with use of macro facility, the ophthalmic surgery can be recorded. The recorded video quality is of 640×480 pixels. However, with newer cameras, even better video quality may be possible. Recorded data is stored on a reusable compact flash memory card, allowing video- recording capacity from few seconds to about an hour (640×480 pixels) and few minutes to 506 minutes (160×120 pixels), depending upon the storage capacity (32 MB to 4 GB) of the card. Use of digital camera for ′still recording′ has also been described, with the help of an indigenously made attachment.34 However, with use of the above mentioned camera, there is no such need. The recorded video is of much smaller (in MBs) size as compared to the one recorded by digital video-recorders (in GBs) and can easily be edited on a home personal computer using software like Windows movie maker (Microsoft), I-film edit (Cinax), Video Impression 2 (Arc Soft), etc. Although the digital recording systems offer a superior quality of video-recording, they are too expensive and cannot be owned by most of the individual ophthalmic surgeons. The cost of such a system is around Rs. 4,25,000, as compared to a much affordable cost of Rs. 10,000- 15,000 for hand held, small digital cameras. Hence, for the individual practitioner, a hand held digital camera may be a cost-effective alternative to expensive digital video-recording and may play an important role in the present era of the internet, in terms of telemedicine.