[Teleteaching in otorhinolaryngology. Part 2: the European database "medicstream"]

Searching the medical literature is mainly characterized by the use of databases. The time for reviewing and printing a paper causes a delay between the first presentation of scientific results in a lecture and the appearance of the appropriate journal publication. Moreover, the possibilities for the integration of multimedia data are limited. Because of the development of new compression algorithms for audiovisual digitization software, the near simultaneous transmission of scientific presentations, both visually and aurally, has been possible since 1999. The section telemedicine of the interdisciplinary study group on image guided surgical navigation from the University of Leipzig has developed "medicstream" as a unique, audiovisual, scientific internetdatabase. It allows the documentation of presentations at congresses and courses, including the discussion,over a freely accessible, widely available homepage, using a home developed streaming technology. All presentations are examined by an authorized editorial committee consisting of representatives with different medical specializations for content before the admission to the data base. A total of 392 presentations from seven scientific meetings can be selected by an integrated search machine and viewed with Windows Media Player or Real Player using a conventional or faster internet connection to the homepage www.medicstream.de. The quality of the audiovisual transmission depends on the receiver-lateral data transmission rate,whereby the minimum variant of 56 kB/s is characterized by good detectability of the contents. In an analysis period of 242 days,we registered 44,199 accesses and 4,488 attendances. The telemedicine data base "medicstream" can optimize quality and extend medical education by live-streaming as well as by archiving scientific presentations as audiovisual data.