Evaluating DDS for Surgical Video Streaming

Real-time video in surgery is crucial for: ● providing immediate visual information, ● enabling precise surgical actions, ● aiding in education and collaboration, ● and facilitating post-operative analysis. The ability for surgical systems to transport metadata that is correlated with the video feed is crucial for surgical applications to be more effective, particularly as surgical robotic systems become more intelligent and autonomous. [1] Many streaming protocols are available for video streaming, like the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and WebRTC, among others. However, these legacy protocols present two challenges: ● They may not be able to satisfy real-time requirements for surgical applications. ● They are specifically designed for media transport only, which makes it difficult or even impossible to transport metadata alongside surgical video. Data Distribution ServiceTM (DDS) is already a popular choice of communications framework for medical robotic systems, and is also the default middleware within ROS2. Consequently, it is worthwhile to evaluate whether DDS is a suitable communication framework for video alongside other data such as control, sensor, or even patient monitor data in a surgical system.