Borealis
Ellaway, Rachel;
Topps, David;
Lachapelle, Kevin;
Spence, John;
Joy, Aislinn;
Cooperstock, Jeremy;
Spencer, Bruce;
Brooks, Martin
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2024-01-11
The goal of the Health Services Virtual Organization (HSVO) project was to create a sustainable research platform for experimental development of shared ICT-based health services. This was based around the development of a focused collection of functioning services supporting patient treatment planning and team & individual preparedness in the operating room, emergency room, general practice clinics, and patients’ bedsides.
A virtual organization was created to develop the platform. The partners were Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in Sudbury and Thunder Bay, the Communications Research Centre and iDeal Consulting in Ottawa, McGill University in Montréal (the Centre for Intelligent Machines and the McGill Simulation Centre), the National Research Council in Fredericton and Innovations in Learning in California. Non-funded partners were added later including the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and University College Cork (UCC) in Ireland.
The platform was based on using Inocybe’s Argia (www.inocybe.ca; software formerly known as UCLP); and NRC’s SAVOIR; Service-oriented Architecture for a Virtual Organization's Infrastructure and Resources (formerly known as Eucalyptus). SAVOIR would connect and control multiple ‘edge devices’ at multiple locations across an articulated private network. The planned edge devices were:
• OpenLabyrinth: this is an open source narrative game engine used for creating and running virtual patient cases.
• Laerdal SimMan 3G: this is a commercial medical simulation mannequin platform consisting of a human model and a range of software tools for creating and executing training scenarios.
• Remote Stereo Viewer (RSV) is a tool for visualizing 3D image datasets, the case of HSVO sourced from the Bassett Collection running from a server at CENIC in California.
• VOLSEG is a tool for visualizing volumetric datasets, in the case of the HSVO project a volumetric visual and interactive rendering of the visible human dataset.
• Camera array is a means to produce virtual camera views either live or from a stored dataset by capturing multiple video camera feeds observing the same scene from a grid perspective.
• General web resources such as the Canadian Medical Association’s Clinical Practice Guidelines. The high level objectives were to:
• Establish an articulated high speed and high capacity articulated private network (APN) between all of the project partners and then establish lightpath capabilities over this network.
• Set up a number of existing edge devices and develop others (in particular a camera array)
• Set up SAVOIR as the middleware hub and connect the edge devices through it via the APN so that
they can be controlled from SAVOIR at multiple locations
• Conduct trials and evaluations of the platform with medical learners