During the ImagéSanté Festival on 18th March, the Sauvenière cinema will live broadcast a surgical intervention on the brain, in 3D. The operation will happen at the CHU, 15 kms away, and the spectators, who will be wearing 3D glasses, will be able to interact with the surgeon during the entire operation. The broadcast is made possible largely thanks to the know-how of Walloon companies.


On Thursday 25th February, the technical and medical staff involved came together for a last rehearsal. Let's take a look at the very unusual backstage.

A priori it is not easy to broadcast a surgical operation even under normal circumstances. The light management (balance between ambient light and the very powerful lamps necessary for surgery), placing the cameras such that they can film without hindering the movements of the medical staff, the duration of a surgery (the one Thursday took over 4 hours), or even moving around in the hospital labyrinth (which is very long especially on the premises of the Sart Tilman CHU), are all elements to take into account. By adding a 3rd dimension to this, the organizers raised the bar.


The image acquisition is handled by Binocle, a French company specialised in 3D stereographic filming. In the operation room the number of cameras are doubled to make this 3D filming possible, the tools and the machinery (namely an Aerocrane on 4 metres of rail) have been supplied by Arc-Cinevideo. Cameramen who have been trained for this type of filming will handle the cameras in this small space while wearing the obligatory sterile clothes.


The control room is installed in the NoTele bus, parked outside the CHU for this occasion, and the director mixes the images coming in from the cameras while the stereographist, Yves Pupulin, analyses the images to make sure they are not distorted by inconvenient gleams or ghosting effects.


For Dominique Durand, the director, it is far from being his first 3D project, but it is the first time he worked on a surgery. It is hard to handle the medical staff's sometimes ill-timed entries in the frame, to avoid objects emerging off-screen because they have been placed in the foreground, etc.

Still in the mobile broadcast unit, the EVS team records all images and puts all the images likely to be broadcast (perhaps even in slow-motion) in a catalogue where the director can find it when he wants to. At the same time an EVS operator live edits the surgery to offer a 2 hour raw programme. The final editing will be done by RTC Liège, a regional television chain well-known with the public in Liège.

Arc-Cinevideo managed to balance the light in the room despite the constraints of a surgery. All will be lighted and balanced so the image will come out well under direction of their DOP.

The sound is handled by the Seraing-based company WNM which supplied the material and managed the technical aspects.

This rehearsal also made it possible for the Intopix and Ulg (Ulg-Intelsig and Ulg-SEGI) teams to prepare for the live 3D broadcast of 18th March. The team of Professor Jacques Verly of Ulg-Intelsig joined forces with IntoPIX to make the transmission of this data possible in live HD 3D, via optic fibre thanks to the SOFICO cooperation which linked the CHU and the Sauvenière cinema.

At the end of the chain, the Liège-based company XDC equipped one of the cinema rooms of the new Grignous complex with digital 3D to ensure perfect vision comfort for future spectators. Note that the company XpanD will supply the 3D visualisation system.

The Walloon Region (and TWIST also since most of them are members of the image technologies network) can be very proud of its enterprises' know-how: with only one exception, the entire broadcasting chain is handled by Walloon talents.