Digital Sketching for Distant Collaborative Diagnosis in Neurosurgery: An Experimentation

This study relates an experiment about multimodal distant collaboration in neurosurgery. We observed a two-hours distant meeting between neurosurgeons, supported by an original platform allowing to convey remotely speech and gesture (videoconferencing) but also images and hand drawn sketches. We use a bottom-up approach, analyzing and understanding the spontaneous activity set up by the professionals. We show that conversations about diagnosis and operational strategies are intimately linked, that different communication modalities are preferred to support different communication topics, and that digital Sketch is a flexible tool in remote collaboration in medicine.