Delhi Theatre Livestreams Surgeries: How a Doctor's Idea Made It to Big Screen

The team screened livestreams of 14 surgeries on the big screen in 3D for an audience of nearly a hundred doctors.

A PVR screening a livestream of a surgery being performed at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi

(Photo courtesy: Dr Sudhir Kalhan Chairman Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery Sir Ganga Ram Hospital)

PVR-Chanakyapuri in Delhi had a screening like never before on Monday, 12 September. This was no ordinary movie, and the audience was not made up of your regular movie buffs.

From 8 am to 6 pm, one of the screens in the cinema hall played livestreams of surgeries being performed in another part of the city – at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

From paediatric surgeries to hernia extractions, the team at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital livestreamed 14 surgeries to an audience of nearly a hundred doctors.

A close-up view of the projection of a laparoscopic hernia operation being performed.

(Photo courtesy: Sir Ganga Ram Hospital)

This ambitious programme was the brainchild of Dr Sudhir Kalhan MS, chairman of the Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. FIT caught up with him to find out how his team pulled it off.

Why a Cinema Hall? Why in 3D?

Speaking to FIT, Dr Sudhir Kalhan said that the main motivation behind attempting something like this was his desire to be able to train more doctors at once.

Dr Kalhan explains, "What I do is laparoscopy, where I put a small stereoscope with a camera inside the patient, and then I see everything on the screen and I operate."

Because of modern technological advancements, this footage on the screen can now be viewed in 3D 4K with accurate depth perception.

"So the surgery has become better for me because I see better. I operate better. The rate of complications in complex surgeries has improved after that."

Dr Sudhir Kalhan MS, Chairman, National Council for Healthcare, ASSOCHAM, and Chairman of Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery Sir at Ganga Ram Hospital

"We have a lot of young surgeons, many are from outside, from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka; they come here for training in advanced surgery," he says, adding, "Normally, if someone comes to my operation theatre, I can show three, four, five people, and there are many who want to learn."

With a screening like this, he says, they could have around 200 to 250 doctors viewing the same surgery at once in 3D and 4K.

The surgeries were screened in a cinema hall in Delhi.

(Photo courtesy: Sir Ganga Ram Hospital)

Dr Kalhan says he has been wanting to do something like this for a while now.

"I had thought about doing this before also but the hardware support and the optical fibre lines were not there. So, what would happen was the signal would drop from time to time."

Dr Sudhir Kalhan MS, Chairman, National Council for Healthcare, ASSOCHAM, and Chairman of Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery Sir at Ganga Ram Hospital

'We Have the Technology Now'

Dr Kalhan explains that he reached out to the owner of PVR cinema halls in Delhi because they already had the infrastructure for screening 3D movies.

"It was an ambitious project for which I had to use a lot of technology. For example, we had to put down two dedicated optical fibre lines between Ganga Ram Hospital and the theatre."

Dr Sudhir Kalhan MS, Chairman, National Council for Healthcare, ASSOCHAM, and Chairman of Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery Sir at Ganga Ram Hospital

Dr Sudhir Kalhan in the operation theatre at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

(Photo courtesy: Sir Ganga Ram Hospital)

'This Is Only the Beginning'

He adds that his team has been getting good feedback from his colleagues since the screening. "We're getting messages from everywhere saying they want to do something like this too."

"This is a technological breakthrough, and now many people want to do it too."

Dr Sudhir Kalhan MS, Chairman, National Council for Healthcare, ASSOCHAM, and Chairman of Institute of Minimal Access, Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery Sir at Ganga Ram Hospital

"It's so convenient that you are operating in your hospital and people are able to watch it in the comfort of a cinema hall. The technology is good, the vision is good, the interaction is good," he adds.