Laser Surgery Goes Online

Ignat writes "Scientists in Australia successfully performed a laser surgery in a Southern California laboratory via the Internet. RoboLase, the new technology used showed that realtime surgeries can be performed from distant locations. Scientists from UC Irvine, UC San Diego and the University of Queensland used RoboLase to produce surgical holes in a distinct pattern of less than one micron in diameter (1/1000th of a millimeter) in single cells."

Comments

Bandwidth or Latency

[matt21811]

"This was a particularly noteworthy accomplishment, because it demonstrated the amount of computer bandwidth (1 gigabyte/second) needed by the Australia and California research groups to observe and grab a fast-moving sperm with virtually no detectible delay in image transmission between the two laboratories."

It seems even the people who did this have no idea of the difference between bandwidth and latency. The above quote is from the original press release.

When I first read the title I thought someone had their lasik done this way, mostly because my wife had her lasik surgery done in Australia (we live there). She wrote about the experience http://www.sharonslasiksurgery.com/ if you want a laypersons point of view.

Doing it remotely is not something I would volunteer for and I suppose that is exactly where this technology is heading.

Re:i cant wait

[Sethus]

I actually asked a good friend of the family about this (a radiologist), why can't they outsource doctors? At the least radiologists, since all they have to do is read xray films! To an extent, some places already do, for instance, in the past doctors had to be on call all night long, ready to read films, sleep very badly, and generally screw up their sleep scheduals. Now they just send the pictures to Australia past 11pm.

But when I asked him about outsourcing, he gave me two good reasons why it'd never happen. THe first is many people prefer to see and know their doctor. To be able to talk with them, I mean, the doctor is probably going to care about you more if he's actually interacting with you! Secondly, is the fact that if hospitals tried this, the doctors would go on strike in an instant. Generally, doctor's don't work "for" a hospital, they are given permission to set up shop inside the hopital in the space provided. What this means, is a group of radiologists do work out of a hospital (in this case, Elyria Hospital near Cleveland) in exchange for the hospital providing them patients. In return, they provide excellent an radiology department :)