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Gall Bladder Removed In France By Doctor In New York
cybaea writes: "In this article, the BBC reports on the first successful major telesurgical operation. Doctors in the United States removed a gall bladder from a patient in eastern France by remotely operating a surgical robot arm." Note that this was using a "high speed optical link," not competing with email, viruses, or other things being sent on the Internet. Update: 09/19 17:05 PM GMT by T : Uh, that's "gall bladder," not "tumor." From this distance they look the same to me.
I think this is funny. There is no mention of a Tumor in the article or the submitters comments, yet it appears as a headline. A gall bladder is an organ, not a tumor.
that the surgeon yelled out "First Incision!"
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
If someone performs a DDOS on a lot of major POPs PNAPs and it inturrupts communication and kills the patient is the script kiddie up for murder?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Boy, a buffer overflow during that would be a bitch.
I can just hear all the surgeons begging their bosses to let them telecommute from home now.
load "linux",8,1
Here's a pic of the robot in action. Looks like that gall bladder was pretty big, or the frenchwoman isn't what I'd call "underweight".
Notice the three large arms sticking in? Gall Bladder surgery is usually arthroscopic. So, long distance surgery does have the drawback of more/bigger scars.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But I would never go for this. Part of the advantage of having such a capable physician is that if anything goes wrong, he can take care of it. The robot arms restrict his options and make it more difficult to work in an emergency.
Not only that, but this involves a reliable high-speed connection. The only time this technology would be truly useful is if you were in the middle of nowhere and needed an operation. But if you're in the middle of nowhere, you'll never be able to get a reliable high-speed connection!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
They were probably competing with viruses of both kinds. You really have to have a sterile environment both over the network and in the operating room.
More bizarre thoughts:
Will doctors sue for carpal tunnel? Will doctors sue for carpal tunnel after performing remote surgeries on carpal tunnel patients? (The ultimate in irony)
Can doctors now prescribe medication remotely? And if so, can I just buy 10 different masks and walk in with each saying "Yea, 100 Vicodin to go please..."
Do the robot arms have bad handwriting as well?
Will the nurses now look like Seven of Nine and give me sponge baths?
Will dentist robots be bugging me now about how bad my brushing habits are, even though I never have cavities?
And finally, will all the script kiddies be hacking into those remote boob-job surgeries? I hope they get grossed out and short circuit their 31337 keyboards with vomit, cause it's not for the squeamish.
This surgery should be encouraging news for NASA.
They're is doing research along this same theme. They someday want robots to be able to be controlled either from the ground or the space station by a person wearing a VR suit. The human can see a 3d image of what the robot is working on and they're working on having the bot transmit some kind of feel (a sense of touch) back to the human. Advantage to this is the ability to make the robot fit into small or dangerous areas and not subjecting a live person to danger.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Just modify the version of Doom that allows you to kill processes and you can do both.
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Make sure the tech team at your local French hospital apply all patches to the communication software or else you might get operated on by a script kiddie from China.
I don't care what internet this runs through, I want a real doctor in the room with me.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
DOCTOR: how r j00 feeling?
PATIENT: ok
DOCTOR: duz this hurt?
PATIENT: ouch
DOCTOR: roflmao
PATIENT:
(PATIENT signed off at 08:36 AM EST)
DOCTOR: hello?
DOCTOR: r u there?
DOCTOR: kewl
(DOCTOR signed off at 08:38 AM EST)
So if they foul up halfway through, is there one doctor who says "hey guys lets try that again! I only fucked up cuz of lag, d00d!"?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Americans would do anything do get to know French women more intimately ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If you figure 3000 miles both ways, then we're talking a minimum 0.03 seconds of lag. When you figure all the overhead, plus you don't get perfect speed, that could be a 0.1 seconds. That seems pretty significant if you are doing delicate surgery. It would be even worse if it was across the world.
As John Carmack once said, "The speed of light sucks".
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
...good thing you're not the surgeon then.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It would be nice for critical applications, such as surgery, critical teleconferencing, ... downloading KDE 2.X..., to pay a couple bucks (X 10) and be on a dedicated route to the other end. Over the Internet, I mean. For the vast majority of Internet usage the passive routing is fine but for a small percentage, it is too happenstance to be trusted. What would it take (besides Internet][, I mean) to have a dedicated route option?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I sure hope it's more accurate than some of the speech recognition tools I've used.
This would be really good if they could setup the system in something the size of an ambulance so people can be fixed up without having to make them endure a helicopter or ambulance ride to the nearest hospital. So is 802.11 ready for this?
... Gaul bladder?
It said in the article that the doctor was pulling a 200ms ping, and that the maximum acceptable latency was 330ms.
Now I'm not trying to troll or be funny here, but that's a pretty lousy ping, especially for a direct fiber link.
I don't know about anyone else, but Quake is damned near unplayable with a 330 ping. We're talking about life and death situations here... If I can't accurately rail someone with that kind of latency, I certainly wouldn't want to be trying to move my scalpel without knicking the femoral artery.
This is an absurd abuse of technology to further a doctor's career. There is no chance that this surgery was in the best interest of the 68 year old patient. Gall bladder surgery is reasonably common and could have been performed by any of a number of local doctors. This was *all* about getting a publication - which is sick. And I don't want to hear about how this technology will revolutionize anything, because the amount of logistical preparation needed on both sides will always make it easier to just fly a specialist to the scene and have her/him operate on the patient.
The best quote from the article...
"The time delay between the surgeon's movements and the return video image displayed on screen was less than 200 milliseconds. The estimated safe lag time is 330 ms."
Estimated safe lag? As determined by who? The NIST? The AMA? Probably the doctor, immediately after hearing that the time delay was 200ms.
-Rothfuss
I'll probably get modded off-topic here, but back in the QuakeWorld days, I got pretty good on dial-up. When I got a fat pipe (college LAN), it took me a couple weeks to regain that. I was so tuned into anticipating the moves and compensating for the lag that I had on a modem that without it, I looked like a spaz.
This has already been done. IIRC open heart surgery was preformed on a guy in an Oriental country (I forget which) over the Internet2 by someone at KUMC (I believe it was KUMC). I saw that on Discovery this Spring. I don't have details for you. Hopefully that will be enough to find it yourself.
While the usefulness can be debated, it's breakthroughs like this that help restore faith in human beings, after witnessing the harm they can cause.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
...can warn the medical team on the other side of the ocean if it was running out of surgical tape or other key materials.
Duct tape can easily replace a empty surgical tape dispenser. Rubber cement, Swingline staplers and binder clips are pretty common, so the robot will be able to refill with the "next best thing" in case of a supply shortage.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Doctors in the United States removed a gall bladder from a patient in eastern France by remotely operating a surgical robot arm.
What we need is remote control firefighters, that can enter burning buildings and put out fires from the safety of the command center a couple blocks away. A much harder problem, due to the necessity to climb stairs and all, but maybe you could make a helicopter version which could break through the upper story windows?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
(In a non-insurance-dominated free market, people could pay for what they wanted, which would probably include cost-effective non-bureaucratically-oriented structures like that. And in a socialized-medicine market, you'd probably have either lots of doctors, if you believe its proponents, or not enough money for experimental technology, if you believe its opponents, or less restriction on what the medical service can do as long as it saves the service money.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's the only surgery I've ever had and it was a breeze - I walked home within 24 hrs
The fun part was when the doc removed the drain he'd left in a few days later - he said "this may feel a bit funny and it might hurt" - hit hurt like hell, but it felt ssooo wierd (all that stuff moving inside you as it came out) I couldn't stop laughing even though it hurt so much