Telemedicine, the ability to exchange highly reliable information in real time: this is the origin of REFINE, the project that aims to develop an experimental solution capable of processing and integrating every useful information about the patient during a surgical procedure.

REFINE, funded by the Azienda Regionale per l'Innovazione e gli Acquisti per la Regione Lombardia (ARIA S.p.A.), is the result of a collaboration between the research group of Prof. Pietro Cerveri from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, ZTE Italia, with its Innovation and Research Centre, and NRGSys. The goal is the implementation of services capable of providing high-definition 3D content, both images and video, on a patient's condition, not only to the surgeon in the operating room, but also to a remotely connected team, thus enabling real-time consultation.

After an initial feasibility study, during the second phase of the project ZTE Italy opened the doors of its Innovation and Research Centre in L'Aquila, providing its 5G infrastructure to test the functioning of the service in an ideal environment in terms of the necessary network requirements.

Thanks to the high bandwidth and low latency of 5G, and with the aid of MEC (Multi Acces Edge Computing) technology, it was possible to reproduce the 4K live streaming and video call scenarios required for one-way and two-way communication between surgeon and remote audience respectively, integrating the possibility for both to interact with the patient's pre-operative data for real-time remote consultation and support.

Having successfully concluded phase two of the REFINE project, the third and final phase is about to kick off. In this phase, the REFINE platform, which integrates extended reality and artificial intelligence, will be tested at the Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori in Milan, where the clinical data communication and transfer techniques with 5G technologies supported by ZTE Italia will also be tried out.