Video quality perception in telesurgery

Telesurgery enables an expert surgeon to assist a remote surgeon during a surgical intervention, which benefits patient care in resource-poor settings. In reality, videos of surgical procedures are compressed and transmitted over large distances in real time and, therefore, are subject to a wide variety of distortions. These distortions degrade the quality of videos and potentially affect the performance of the surgeons. Very little work has been carried out on human perception of video quality in the context of telesurgery. In this paper, we investigate the impact of video compression on the perceived quality of surgical videos. We designed and performed a psychophysical experiment where surgeons rated the quality of surgical videos distorted with two different compression schemes at various compression ratios. Experimental results demonstrate that the impact of video content and compression strategy on the perceived quality is statistically significant.