Electro-mechanic steering device for head-lamp mounted miniature video cameras

Background: Endoscopic or microscopic video recordings set a widely established standard for medico-legal documentation of operative procedures. In addition, they are an essential part of undergraduate as well as postgraduate medical education. Macroscopic operations in the head and neck can be recorded by miniaturised video cameras attached to the surgeon's head lamp.

Methods: The authors present an electro-mechanic steering device which has been designed to overcome the parallax error created with a head-mounted video camera, especially as the distance of the camera to the operative field varies.

Results: The device can be operated by the theatre staff, while the sterility of the operative field is maintained and the surgeon's physical working range remains unrestricted. As the video image is reliably centred to the operative field throughout the procedure, a better orientation and understanding for spectators who are unfamiliar with the surgical steps is obtained.

Conclusions: While other adverse factors to macroscopic head-mounted video recordings, such as involuntary head movements of the surgeon, remain unchanged, the device adds to a higher quality of video documentation as it relieves the surgeon from adjusting the image field to the regions of interest. Additional benefit could be derived from an auto-focus feature or from image stabilising devices.