TAMPA, FL – Video content analysis, by which recorded media is scoured automatically to detect and track specific pieces of information – motion detection, say, or facial recognition – is still a very new technology. But it's already finding footholds everywhere from CCTV security cameras to big Hollywood studios.
It's gaining traction in healthcare, too. Tampa, Fla.-based H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute is just one recent example.
Moffitt, one of the biggest cancer centers in the United States, maintains a video library that comprises some 18,000 minutes of footage. These video clips might include anything from a detailed medical procedure to a lecture from a world-renowned visiting specialist, describing a new treatment breakthrough.
That information can be crucial – but it might not always be that easy to find. By deploying a technology from Cisco called Pulse, Moffitt researchers, clinicians and other employees can search for key phrases spoken within the video clips, allowing them to sort through video footage, quickly zeroing in on the right information.
Pulse uses voice recognition to automatically tag video content as it moves across Moffitt's networks, alleviating the need to manually manage the clips for search engines, officials say. The technology integrates with other Cisco platforms such as TelePresence and WebEx, enabling smarter searching and more collaboration.
As more and more content is generated – consider, for example, that some 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute – and more and more people are viewing and sharing those clips, it's more important that the content be well-organized and easily searchable.
"Once video becomes pervasive – just like the Web did in the ’90’s –finding what you are looking for, or discovering something useful becomes a big challenge (as does storage and management of video)," writes Erica Schroeder, director at Cisco Enterprise Video, on the Cisco blog. "Video analytics automatically tags video so that means you can find the video or content – speaker or topic – you want inside a particular video."
On the same blog, Didier Moretti, VP and general manager of Cisco's Emerging Business Group, points to a study this past September from Cisco IBSG that showed two out of three business executives "already watch employee-created videos at least once a week. They comment on the video, recommend it or forward it on to other colleagues. But even as video makes it easier to do business, it generates more information for us to process and sort."
Moffitt officials say the Pulse system is easy enough to use that it enjoys a whopping 95 percent use rate among the center's 4,500 employees, who tap it to easily keep apprised of company updates department-wide "town hall forums," or to watch recordings of grand rounds to learn about the latest and best advances in treatments.
Using Cisco Pulse as part of its digital media platform "is really on the cutting edge of what we we’re trying to accomplish here," says John Maass, manager of conferencing technology systems and support at Moffitt.
Moffitt has been compiling its video repository "since pre-YouTube days," he says – 25 years of legacy content in various formats, in fact. But "searching through all that content was an issue for us – all this content that just sits out there. How people get to the meat of the topic is always a concern."
David Stringfellow, systems architect at Moffitt, is impressed by how Pulse is able to scan videos, "learn which speaker is talking and then actually pick out and transcribe all the words."
Then, whether the video has to do with cancer terminology or more mundane procedural stuff such as human resources memos and staff communications, "pulse analytics automatically generates tag words" for each video based on voice recognition.
Using that specificity, says Stringfellow, a time-pressed physician "could jump to where a specific speaker was talking" in a video and make use of that particular section, rather than slogging through the whole thing in search of the relevant information.
He notes that system admins can assign different employees to different levels of access to maintain security and protect personal health information (PHI). "We can specify that only doctors in a particular group can watch this presentation, so we're not worried that we're going to see some anonymous user watching something they shouldn't be watching."
There are ways they'd like to increase and expand the platform's use. "Some features we don't see a lot of use of – we haven't gotten that social thing worked out quite yet, and don't see a lot of commentary" on the videos.
Still, "the use is pretty wide-ranging," he says.
And increasing. From research confabs to meetings for middle management to sessions where surgical centers develop techniques with videographers in tow – whose clips will soon be used to spark subsequent discussion and collaboration – video is playing a bigger and bigger role at Moffitt.
"What we see for the future is that our researchers will start making videos about what they're doing in their labs," says Stringfellow. "They'll be able to show, via a recording, what type of gene mutations are happening or how a specific tumor is reacting to a type of treatment, and share it with other researchers."
The Cisco Pulse analytics will map and markup those crucial research tools, where other collaborators and students can then search and leave comments on specific points. "It's a big step forward," he says.
"We expect video to take off and continue to grow," says Maass.
