Summary: A compact and practical medical image recorder with ability store medicolegal data inside the images.
What is the problem?: Recorded endoscopic images of a patient may be presented as if they belong to someone else. How can I know it belongs to the patient claimed?
What is the innovation?: A compact and practical recording device that records data about location, time, date and patient data inside the images in a non-alterable fashion. The data can be verified by third parties.
Status: Prototype ready. Patent is applied for.
Seeking: Partner to distribute the product to the whole world market.
What is a medico-legal recorder anyway?
Medical professionals would like to document their findings. Today endoscopic instruments are widely used for diagnosis as well as surgical procedures. Endoscopic devices provide video images. Specialists would like to record images of important features, lesions, problems, findings to document the problem. This is used for consultations with their team as well as education and getting paid for the procedure.
What do we expect from a medical recorder?
Surgeons would like to use the recorder without breaking their sterile condition. Typically they want to use their feet to do the job. Short tap, image recording, long tap video clip recording. At the end of the session all files are recorded to a USB stick to take away or send to a predefined repository.
No editing, no hassle
What is the innovation?
So far everything we said is already known and there are already devices (albeit more expensive) doing this job. To explain the innovation, we need to look at the problem from somebody else’s perspective.
Somebody pays for the procedure. It may be Medicare, SGK, or insurance company. They would like to verify the procedure, make sure that it is performed for the specific patient claimed, for the specific procedure.
How do we do it?
As the image is recorded, GPS location of the recording device, the name of the patient, the date, the time, the name of the patient, the name of the practicing surgeon, the serial number of the recording device are recorded inside the image using steganographic imaging. Out of these data, only patient’s name and doctor’s name are entered manually, all other data is recorded automatically in a non-changeable manner. Image is encoded inside the image using steganographic technique. Once recorded, the data can not be altered. You can erase the whole image if you want, but you can not change it. (The data is not recorded in the fashion you are familiar with. You can not change something you don’t see!)
The data inside the image can be extracted by a third party using a program. So the insurance company can verify the information provided by their client.
We call this EndoWiz, wizard of endoscopic image. Our technology is patent pending.
