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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."
please : don't slashdot them while they are operating some people...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"Sir, we are getting a 404 from your heart."
I wonder if any of the special IP priorities that rarely get used outside of LANS (or in) were used.
Also, if any encryption was done, because id be concerned with achieving maximum latency possible.
They said over a commercial network, so I'd have to assume encryption, possibly with special hardware for it.
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NO CARRIER
Is this what you call a telephone operator?
Lots of folks complained about internet2, but this should be a prime example of why it is important.
Just last week, we had a drop out of the Abilene node and most traffic from our lab was routed onto commodity routes where the performance degredation in terms of bandwidth and latency was pretty noticeable. I have become used to the gigabit ethernet performance in my dual G4 and degradation in performance with it due to Internet2 downtime is frustrating.
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Cheers, Joel
The surgeon just kicked your ass in Counter Strike with a 2ms ping.
I think this has great potential. Some operations can only be done by a select group of surgeons, this technology makes it possible to perform operations that wouldn't normally be performed in a hospital. I think this is going the save lives on the long run. Let's just hope they don't run Windows, I wouldn't like a crash when I'm on the table.
Sooner or later, an operation like this is going to fail. When questioned, the doctor will respond, "omfg!!!!! fucken lag!!!!!"
We already use micro-manipulators to do things so fine that we humans find it hard to control our own hands to do. There are many things a machine just does much better than we can.. things like zoom vision, ability to see from angles where we can not get our heads to, and doing precision tasks. Ever tried to make stitches as precise as a sewing machine?
The business end of the machines can be much smaller than our fingers, and tools on the machine are designed expressly for needed things. None of this "hand me the scapel, nurse" stuff. The machine can have as many arms and tools as the designers deem necessary.
And the machines can be made absolutely sterile. It is really hard to sterilize a human, and still have us functional.
It is really a tiny, very tiny, step from going to having a surgeon sitting next to a patient doing the surgery, to having one on the other side of the world doing it... ( the main problem is latency ).
The biggest advantage to the patient is that his need of surgical services may happen at any time - what it means is there is a world-wide pool of surgeons available to help - right now. They do not need to get scrubbed. If they are a critical care surgeon, by golly, they may have their end right in their den at their personal residence. Even if the surgeon was in a most unsanitary condition at the time of need, that would not be a factor. Time is. And that is what this technology gives us. Who is best equipped to meet the need... NOW.
This is what dreams are made of. This is why we go to work. To make things like this.
This is why we need technology.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
No link, no matter how fast or secure, will let a physician monitor the status of his patient nearly as much as actually being there. I could do my job from remote at home, but my boss prefers I actually come in to work, in case something goes wrong I can be there first hand to see what's going wrong.
It's not like 400km is a great divide. Drive it. fly it. Okay, the operation was a success, but say it wasn't. The first question that's going to be asked is, "and you decided to perform the operation from beside your swimming pool watching it on your 14" TFT why?"
I'm not surprised this is possible, nor would I bother with the risk. What do we need airplane pilots or taxi drivers for, if these jobs can ben done by someone sitting behind a console or in a cafe. Hell, someone could fly two planes at once.
Get my drift?
... if we can perform surgery via telerobotics, why wouldn't we be able to perform, say, guided experiments in space?
... of course, we'd have to deal with staying in contact with the shuttle while it orbited the Earth, and the lag associated with such distances ... and it wouldn't be quite so exciting ...
Given the inherent safety issues with routine space travel, how difficult would it be to create a remotely manned orbiter to carry out space based experiments?
It seems like there would be a tremendous number of benefits -- no direct risk to human life, smaller shuttle / more room for payloads, 24/7 operation (split shifts behind the controls), etc.
Just a thought. Any ideas?
This is probably the killer app. Being a med student myself (and having just watched Scrubs) I think the ability to have someone watching over your shoulder during an important operation would greatly assist confidence during learning surgical procedures -- especially during unusual times of the morning when the hospital is understaffed etc., and you're the house surgeon lumped with everyone walking in the door.
However, allowing dangerous operations to be undertaken in remote locations is probably not a great idea... without qualified staff physically on hand, I don't think you'd want to trust someone's life to an IP connection; otherwise, the next time some DDoS or Outlook worm strikes, servers aren't the only thing we lose.
By David Orenstein, December 2001 Issue
Earlier this fall, 68-year-old Madeleine Schaal volunteered to make medical history by allowing Jacques Marescaux and Michel Gagner to remove her gall bladder. What's so unusual about that? Only that she lay on an operating table in her hometown of Strasbourg, France, while the two doctors performing the surgery were in New York.
I don't think latency would be such a big deal. It would be rather simple to write some sync code. That way the surgery might lag, but at least the surgeon's movements would never be ahead of the operation itself. His commands could be ignored until the two ends were in sync again.
killer app? Excuse me? They're teaching med students to kill, these days, are they?
Man, no wonder malpractice is out of hand.
And being rabid is no excuse.
Best case: surgery is fine, patient recovers.
Worst case: link gets disrupted, surgery machine goes Max Headroom on the patient -- "sl-sl-sl-sl-slice!!"
evil adrian
Obligitory bad joke: "So would all operations be done calling collect?"
All I ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work.
The cool thing about the Canadian health care system is that ANY citizen can get free Internet surgery!
evil adrian
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
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...
with this perverse investment in technology it brings to light the possibility of murder by Virus.
Hack a machine being prepared for the surgery and have it send a horizontal slice 30 minutes into Mr. Gates open heart surgery.
There is no stopping this kind of crime unless the computers involved are Bios flashed, loaded from ROM media(from a locked and certified source), and tested immediately before the procedure. quite like putting all your physical devices in an autoclave.
I like tech, but I'll stick to live docs for a while, or get it done quickly before this type of crime comes to surface.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
400km is nice, but how about New York to Strasbourg, France, 2 years ago, using the same Zeus robot ?
Unfortunately it was drowned under the 9/11 news at the time.
Google for "Operation Lindbergh"
as a surgeon, i have my misgivings about these types of surgery. the easy surguries a 4th year medical student can do. the hard ones are what we get paid for. laparoscopic surgery can have severe complications, like poking a big vessel called the AORTA. you need someone who can open up a patient and stop the bleeding RIGHT AWAY. there are times when you just can't use laparoscopy also, and you need actual feel. cost-wise, it may be cheaper buy a bus ticket for the patient to get the consultation 400 km away, than for every hospital in the country to have these robots in the OR.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
In his classic 1946 novel "City" Clifford Simak predicted the fall of the city as the focal point of human life and interaction. Telecomunications and globally networked computers were going allow people to live anywhere, and work from wherever that was, over the network, creating a dispersed culture with minimal "face time" in people's lives.
Independant robots with artificial intelligence were, of course, a major part of that invisioned future, taking over the tasks of housemaid and gardener, thus further reducing the overall level of interhuman interaction. ( Can you say automatic vacuum cleaner? I knew you could)
Truely visionary. In 1946 the American suburb and "planned community", as we know it, was still a gleam in the Levitt's eyes. Computers themselves were the crude and expensive dinosaurs of geek myth and networks didn't exist, let alone anything on the scale of the internet.
What makes all of this relevant to the article is that Simak predicted one of the side effects of this would be an increasing social isolation of humanity, to the point where we were actually unable to deal with each other face to face, or even leave our homes with any comfort. To an extent the evidence suggests that there is a certain truth to this and all of us here are well familiar with the stereotype of the net connected and sophisticated geek huddling in some dark hole somewhere (like his mother's basement) but essentially inept at face to face confrontation.
To illustrate this he chose to tell the story of a supremely gifted surgeon who allowed a friend to die, a friend with the answer to life, the universe and everything ( as yet unrevealed to the public), simply because his isolationist produced agoraphobia didn't allow him to travel to perform the needed surgery.
Simak's prescience in this novel is absolutely stunning in scope ( and the story is masterful as well, read it), but the one thing he did not forsee was that even *surgery* would one day be performed from our isolated aeries in the Himalayas ( well, to be fair, he did actually take this partially into account by placing the surgeon on Earth and the patient on Mars, thus net lag was a significant factor in the requirement that the surgeon actually be *present* on Mars, but we can already forsee ways around this problem).
Perhaps only our geometrically increasing numbers stand between us and his vision of an isolated future lived over the net.
KFG
Being that I am currently living on a tiny island in the middle of the East China Sea, I would love to have the comfort of knowing a critical operation could be done on me within hours as opposed to the days it would take to either get me to the doctor or vice versa
This will not happen, but not for the reason you think.
If you think it through, you will realise that there are far more surgeons than robotic technicians. You might get away without the surgeon at one end, but who is going to fix the robot, or the internet connection? At this stage, robots, computers and networks generally die in operation far more often than their human equivalents.
Which means that the support crews are going to be huge.
In fact, it will be cheaper to fly the surgeon to a tiny island in the east china sea than to fly in the robotics. No to mention that you are going to keep the operating rooms equipped with stuff to do every complex operation that can be done?
This sort of thing may happen one day, but by then we will have robots doing much simpler tasks all the time; including things like driving taxi's around town, cleaning up your house and seeking election to another term of government.
Final take - experienced surgeons and teams are cheaper and more portable than this sort of technology, and its going to be a long time before that changes.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
The actual point is that there are very peculiar operations that only a few surgeons in the world are able and willing to perform; e.g. the seperation of twins conjoined at their heads. Now compare flying them around from continent to continent to having them stay at home, where they could still be able to do the same job.
Of course it would be nice for our Chinese friend if someone set up a whole operating room in his home, but this is still science fiction. Flying him over to a nearby hospital on the mainland (or another island, wherever the nearest one is) and promptly starting the operation would still be an huge improvement over having him to transport to Beijing or having to wait days for a surgeon.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
Thank you for raising the level of discourse.
CBC radio will be (is) having a short bit on the operation. (12:32 est Probably it can be time-surfed at CBC Radio
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.