The third demo I witnessed at telecommunications giant NTT‘s showroom “Note” [JP] in Tokyo last week revolved around telemedicine, the concept of sending audio, video and other data through a network for remote medical consulting, diagnosis or examination. NTT’s offering is currently being used by 19 institutions in Japan.

The difference between the telemedicine system set up in the showroom and those used outside is that the former can transfer video in high resolution. In the video embedded below, you can see how an NTT employee “performs” remote pathological diagnosis of cells through a monitor connected to a microscope that’s located in a hospital that doesn’t have a pathologist.

Doctors can control the microscope (which could theoretically be located at the other end of the world) through a controller and view the monitor standing in front of them to examine cells and deliver a diagnosis to the hospital. In the demo, the data transfer is being handled by NTT’s proprietary next-generation network (NGN), a high-performance optical fiber network launched in 2008.

Here’s the video I shot at the company’s showroom: