eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla., is using the Cisco Pulse video analytics platform to search through videos using keywords to enable more efficient cancer research and learning.
Pulse uses voice recognition to search through videos using keyword tagging. Users can browse libraries of videos by speaker or topic.
The system presents tags automatically and identifies experts and content. “The system is automated so it will learn via speech recognition who’s presenting,” John Maass, manager of conferencing technology systems and support, Moffitt Cancer Center, told eWEEK.
“It automatically generates two to five speakers and learns them,” added David Stringfellow, systems architect for Moffitt Cancer Center. “They’re identified in all new videos.”
Arrows show each point in the video that a keyword appears, so viewers can go right to the information they need.
With doctors balancing time spent on research as well as treating patients, the video searching makes their time more efficient, Maass explained.
Researchers can sort through 18,000 minutes of video to find the information they need, according to Cisco.
Moffitt is using Pulse along with Cisco’s Digital Media Suite, which are applications for Webcasting, video sharing, digital signage and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV).
Among the cancer center’s 4,500 employees, 95 percent are using Pulse, according to Cisco.
The researchers use Pulse to capture lectures and presentations on video and search them by topics such as a particular disease, a type of drug therapy or a gene, said Stringfellow.
“We’re doing groundbreaking work as we’re planning discoveries and techniques to fight this disease,” said Maass.
Moffitt has also deployed Pulse internally to employees so it can be used during the organization’s monthly staff meetings. It plans to roll out Pulse video analytics in an external portal by November to patients and their families as well as staff, said Maass.
Unlike with YouTube, where most videos are a few minutes long, videos in health care, education and business are about an hour long, Didier Moretti, vice president and general manager of Ciscos Media Experience and Analytics business, told eWEEK.
Using Pulse, researchers can search for a keyword such as oncology and find the relevant five-minute segment within an hour-long video, said Moretti.
Pulse has a voice imprint feature that allows it to recognize specific speakers, he said.
Prior to Pulse, Moffitt had a video portal 10 or 15 years ago that lacked the search capabilities of the current platform, said Maass. “If you knew the title or date, you could look through fairly easily with poor quality and hopefully watch what you’re looking for,” Maass recalled. “It wasn’t very searchable.”
Now users can log in to Pulse in a secure connection and find content specific to Moffitt, said Maass.
Pulse searches Websites and document libraries to build a vocabulary list of terms, according to Stringfellow. “We went through hundreds of thousands of pages to get spoken keywords,” he said.
“It builds what it thinks is your vocabulary list,” added Stringfellow. “We took that and narrowed it down.”
In addition, Pulse eliminates the need for researchers to look through pages and pages of electronic newsletters, said Stringfellow.
Moffitt is also testing Pulse for live diagnostics with ultrasound along with the Cisco TelePresence video conferencing platform. TelePresence is used for virtual telehealth sessions as well as court depositions, said Stringfellow.
“We have affiliates and global partners record telehealth sessions, then it goes into a repository for transcoding and analytics sessions,” Stringfellow explained. “Docs can research what was spoken about during the course of treatment.”