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Video Over IP Permits South Pole Surgery
Henry Malmgren writes "Last week at the South Pole research station, we successfully completed knee surgery using a video over IP link back to the United States. The article is light on technical details, but what we did was to use a Polycom VTC unit to send a video signal to Raytheon Polar Services HQ in Colorado. Our signal went primarily over a Marisat satellite at T1 speeds, and then HQ redistributed the video to Boston via a dedicated ISDN line. We had signal problems several times during the transmission with Marisat, so we had to switch to a NASA TDRS satellite towards the end of the surgery. We also used an Iridium phone as a voice backup for the times when we couldn't get decent quality over either bird. During the surgery there were three cameras that we used to send back video to the states. One was the built in camera on the VTC unit, a second was a handheld Sony 8mm unit, and a third was a black and white "Doc Cam". This was a head mounted camera with a LED light unit that was built on station by our Senior Communications Technican, Jon Berry. This allowed the transmission of video from the Doctor's perspective. Unfortunately, while the Doc cam worked great locally, and we got great recordings of the surgery from it, it didn't work well over the satellite link. The camera view jumped around so much that it didn't compress well over the satellite link. The best video was obtained by putting the hand held camera on a tall tripod which was able to look directly into the surgical wound."
Some of the story can be found here. There is more here.
I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been more telesurgery experiments; I find the whole idea fascinating, and that the process can be made to work at all really amazing and impressive.
But I think that the referenced article had a better take on it than this posting, whose "additional technical details" are, at best, unintentionally misleading.
The implication of "video over IP" is that you did this over the public IP network, which in fact is not the case.
The fact that you did this over what was effectively a dedicated point-to-point link means that the use of the IP transport was irrelevant (worse; it added unnecessary overhead, subtracting from the total data rate).
I understand not wanting to risk someone's knee on a link succeptible to a DOS (or only succeptible as a result of a substantial investment of effort on the part of the attacker). But your posting implies that this is something which took place over the public Internet, or *could* take place over the public Internet, when it's not.
-- Terry
I don't mean the story happening on July 5th, I mean in the transmission. I'd hate to be the surgeon cutting, like, even 100ms before I see what I'm cutting. I Take that back. I'd really hate to be the patient, being a surgeon can't be a bad thing, anyway you look at it. Seriously, anybody has numbers on this, or is it just something you get used too? Like if you had real long arms, impecceble vision, and had to operate 30,000km away..?
If you want to know more about life in antarctica, and the realities of being a doctor, a friend of mine resigned a top surgeon's job to spend a year in antartica as medical officer (plus dentist, plus hairdresser).
Great diary, the real issues of life at the south pole, great photos... have a read of Ingrid On Ice
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best