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Canadian Surgeons Perform Telerobotic Surgery
AndroidCat writes "While the equipment used isn't new, this operation was different because one of surgeons was 400km away. Dr. Mehran Anvari in Hamilton Ontario tele-operated instruments in North Bay General Hospital, supervised by Dr. Craig McKinley on site. The link was over a high priority routed Bell Canada connection. The patient, Ms. Fortier is doing quite well. Don't try this from home with a dialup connection."
Good consideration and caution. Nicest to err on the side of safety if at all possible.
Consider I am driving down some back woods road and have my accident. I am tore up bad. They run me into the hospital. No-body there is really up to doing open-heart surgery to fix where the steering column tore into me. But they do have a robot in the OR. I am bleeding to death NOW. Sure, I would love to have qualified staff on hand standing by to see to it my needs are met, but that is just not an option here. Inside of two minutes, they can probably connect to somebody in some time zone somewhere in the world who knows what to do. Wheel me in and let the guy over in Australia fix me up while I lay bleeding to death in Kansas at 2AM. If the system goes down while I am under the knife, I am really still no worse off than if I did not have the option of telesurgical care in the first place. There is maybe a 0.1% chance of system failure, but there is 99.9% chance there won't be technical problems. Its that probability I am betting my life on.
And, as noted, the whole operation, being digitized, is a movie record of what happened so it can be later reviewed for doing it better next time and training students.
Can't you imagine the simulation software we can come up with so students can run simulations until they feel comfortable with the real thing? Kinda like flight simulators for pilots, so you can crash a few times without getting all the next of kin on your tail.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Wait a minute...it's not like there was a lady on an operating table, being prodded by a robot and no-one around save perhaps a pimply-faced computer geek to make sure everything was going well. There WAS a doctor overseeing events at the site. Conversely, it's not like the doctor on the other end was lounging by the pool, tweaking the trackpoint of his IBM ThinkPad. This technology wouldn't be used on a person unless it was proven safe and the benefits for outweighed possible risks (also, remember they weren't doing brain surgery on their maiden voyage--it was surgery to correct an acid-reflux problem, so if there were problems the risk of death would be quite low).
You're right--400 km isn't exactly a cross-continent trek, but keep in mind that a round trip by car would eat up eight hours of a skilled surgeon's time (and time is money), and even flying would take a few hours. Also, remember the surgery was in North Bay and performed by a doctor in Hamilton. North Bay isn't exacly a metropolitan hub--there's maybe what...50,000 people there? I don't think there are gonna be direct flights leaving hourly from Hamilton. Besides, do you know what the weather has been like in Ontario lately? Cold and horrible! Flight schedules aren't going to be reliable, and driving 400 km through a blizzard would be quite treacherous!
The next step is to start using this technology in places like Yellowknife. Yellowknife! Not exactly the kind of place that's teeming with specialised surgeons, and a doctor in Toronto can't easily hop a train, plane or taxi there, nor can the patient be safely relocated to Toronto without great expense and risk. You'd have to hop a 727 in Toronto to Edmonton, a lear jet to Ft. McMurray and a turboprop to Yellowknife (at best you might be able to avoid the stopover in Ft. McMurray)--or else spend a great deal of taxpayer's money in an already strained socialised haelthcare system on a special private direct flight.
Yup, telesurgery starts to look pretty appealing if you've been suffering on a long waiting list typical of the healthcare system in Canada, and it offers you the chance to get it done not only properly, but much sooner as well.
And if we put a taxi driver out of a job who the hell cares--he's probably an immigrant with 10 years of medical training and a long history of performing surgery in Pakistan, scaping out a living until all the immigration bullshit has been shoveled and he can get certified to work as a doctor in Canada. Maybe the money saved with this technology can make that process go faster so he can "do surgery by the pool" with Dr. Anvari. That old farmer in Cowcrap, Saskatchewan who needs his hernia fixed might appreciate the resulting shorter waiting time too...