First-of-its-kind robot surgery event powered by Microsoft Azure Media Services

2 min. read

Published on February 23, 2015

published on February 23, 2015

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A week ago today, thousands of medical students and doctors tuned in to a first-of-its-kind event to witness robotic arms cutting people open and patching up whatever needs fixing in real-time.

The Worldwide Robotic Surgery Event (WRSE) was a 24-hour robotic surgery training and certification event powered by Microsoft’s Azure Media Services and delivered via Microsoft’s technology partner LiveArena. Microsoft’s backend services allowed over 3000 students and medical professionals from around the world to pause and rewind their live stream to rewatch and better grasp what they were seeing, all from the comfort of their own homes, schools, and workplaces.

Azure was chosen as a solution due to the difficulties of conducting live surgeries in the past. Live events were expensive, risky, and required that surgeons perform the complex operation in environments that were unfamiliar to them, possibly increasing the risk of things going wrong. As a result, surgeries were streamed from 10 different robotic surgery centers around the world.

“Streaming the event live using Azure Media Services and LiveArena was significantly more cost efficient, and more importantly, provided greater accessibility to student viewers.” – Julianne Carroll, Product Marketing Manager, Azure Media Services, Microsoft

Microsoft’s Azure Media Services can also be used by broadcasters, cable providers and surgeons to stream content live to a massive audience and on a wide range of devices thanks to its extremely scalable nature. The cloud DVR capability build into the service makes for a great and easy way to provide viewers with the flexibility to seamlessly switch between live and video-on-demand modes so that they can watch live content at their own pace.

We’ve embedded the video of the WRSE 24-hour event above for your viewing “pleasure”, but be warned, if you are easily grossed out by blood and organs and robot arms fiddling around in some poor souls’ body, you might want to skip this.

Radu Tyrsina

Radu Tyrsina has been a Windows fan ever since he got his first PC, a Pentium III (a monster at that time). For most of the kids of his age, the Internet was an amazing way to play and communicate with others, but he was deeply impressed by the flow of information and how easily you can find anything on the web. Prior to founding Windows Report, this particular curiosity about digital content enabled him to grow a number of sites that helped hundreds of millions reach faster the answer they're looking for.