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.