Abstract
As demonstrated by the recent increase of civil and criminal suit in medical fields, society has come to have negative perceptions about medical treatments. Defendants (doctors/hospitals) in medical suits are often required to submit records including images of processes during surgeries. It is therefore essential to keep images as medical case history in endoscopic surgery based on the charge couple device (CCD). The present study examines an objective storage method for endoscopic surgical records. The image synchronous documentation system developed by KS Olympus (Tokyo, Japan) was used to document the images of a surgery itself as well as an external view in synchronization with biological information including blood pressure, ECG and oxygen saturation under anesthesia. The documented data was then stored on a removable HDD as randomly accessible data. Different storage conditions were comparatively examined in regard to image resolution and cost. It was found that MPEG1 1.5Mbyte/h is currently the best cost-performance storage condition. It was also confirmed that the system could objectively document surgical data. The present system is useful for documenting the information from various types of surgery including endoscopic surgery.
