Is broadcasting heart procedures at meetings safe?

Broadcasting heart procedures live to doctors at medical meetings may not present a risk to the patient on the table, a new study suggests.

It's already common practice for major medical meetings to feature "live case demonstrations" - where doctors can watch a real-time transmission of a procedure being done at a large medical center anywhere in the world.

The goal is to help doctors learn from experienced colleagues and see new technology in action. But there's been little research into whether there's any special risk to the patient having the procedure.

In theory, there could be. Not only are there distractions - like cameras - in the operating room, but there's a live discussion as well. The surgeons talk about what they are doing, and in many cases they take comments from an expert panel at the meeting as they operate.

To study the question, doctors at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, reviewed records for 101 patients who had their heart procedure transmitted live to a medical meeting between 1998 and 2010.

They found that the procedures were a "technical success" 95 percent of the time.

One patient had a minor stroke because of a heart-rhythm disturbance during the procedure. And another had a rise in blood levels of a protein called troponin - which can signal a heart attack or other damage to the heart muscle.

But that complication rate was no different from that of 66 patients who underwent the same procedures by the same doctors - only not fed live to an audience.

EXPERIENCE, CAREFUL SELECTION

The findings, reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions, are not the final word.

One of the biggest limitations is that they are based on procedures at just one hospital.

"Our paper calls for future studies which will include immediate results, as well as follow-up outcomes of procedures performed live during large meetings," Dr. Ariel Roguin, one of the researchers on the work, told Reuters Health in an email.

But for now, he and his colleagues write, the findings suggest that live demonstrations may be safe when experienced doctors operate on "carefully selected" patients.

That, Roguin said, includes picking patients who are good candidates for the procedure, and not at elevated risk for complications.

The state of live demonstrations in cardiology is still under debate. Some professional societies - including the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons - have suggested that major meetings consider banning live surgery broadcasts.

At the same time, Roguin said, the demos offer educational opportunities to a large number of doctors. And since the point is to educate, the demonstrations are done by "very, very experienced" surgical teams.