Quality evaluation of compressed 3D surgical video

3D medical video was forecasted to be one of the groundbreaking 3D video applications. These range from tele-consultation to 3D robotics surgery. Enabling 3D video in e-health applications results in the provision of more natural viewing conditions, improved diagnosis and accurate interventions in surgical procedures. The deployment of 3D video services in healthcare is made possible to some extent by the advanced capturing devices (e.g., 3D endoscopes), recent advances in wireless communication technologies (e.g., LTE-Advanced(LTE-A)) and 3D video display technologies. Remote robotic assisted surgery and surgery training (education for surgeons) can benefit in particular from 3D video technologies due to the added dimension of depth. This paper analyzes the quality of compressed 3D surgical video. Moreover, asymmetric encoding of 3D medical video without compromising the medical quality of experience (M-QoE) is investigated in this paper. The quality of the compressed 3D medical video with the proposed method is evaluated using a comprehensive subjective quality evaluation test involving 12 medical surgeons. The results show a slightly better perception with the proposed asymmetric coding method compared to reference symmetric compression method, however the difference is statistically insignificant.