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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."
Kinda gives new meaning to the phrase blue screen of death, doesn't it? Ba dum bum! Thank you very much, I'll be here all week! Remember to tip your bartender!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
i can't wait for my doctor to be outsourced to India.
"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.
Will this work with my Linksys router?
www.lonseidman.com
Yeah, this means it won't be long before a computer worm can really, directly kill someone ;-/
I'm sorry, Mr Smith. The receptionist clogged up our bandwidth with illegal P2P downloading while we were making the incision. So, uh, it's just a tad off. Sorry.
Luke
----
Have friends and family that don't understand computers? Don't want to explain them? Send them to ChristianNerds.com, the Easy-to-Understand Computer Encyclopedia.
What happens if hackers sniff the packets, save the procedure to a file, create a torrent, and distribute the surgery all over the internet?
The artist...er..doctors won't get paid for their work.
I would imagine if some packets were lost, or lag? It is inevitable, would you really want to risk it with that?
"Ze goggles! Dey do NOTHING!"
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
And now I make my first incision .
<nurse> Nice work there Doctor.
<doctor>.
<doctor>.
<doctor> DIE DIE DIE!!!!
* stab stab stab *
<nurse> What the hell are you doing!!!!???!!
<nurse> You've made a freakin' mess. There's bloody all over the theatre!
<nurse> Somebody help!!!!!!!!
<doctor>
<doctor> Sorry was AFK and my little brother was messing with my pc
Or, perhaps, he's just pissed that his job, his American-based job, is being sent to India.
No offense to the Indians, but if they are just as capable as we are at doing our jobs, let them do their jobs in their country. Last I recall, their country isn't in the best of state...
Meanwhile unemployement here suffers due to us being out jobs, and well, there's really no solution for us. Companies just want to lower their bottom lines, and the best way to do that is fire employees and either pay a machine to do the work, or pay someone way, way less for it.
I'm not racist; I have many good friends who are Indian, Chinese, Slovic, and other races, and I have no problem with them being here in America working. My problem comes when the jobs here are being moved out of our country. We've almost reversed our position from the industrial revolution, when people would migrate here just to work. And we're losing our tech crown because nobody's willing to innovate because it costs too much. These are the things that piss us off, and it's not about racism. If you want to talk about hidden racism, go talk to one of the news *coughFOXcough* networks talking about the Middle East situtation.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I see "remote surgery" and even AI-assisted remote surgery as the future for battlefields, outer space, and other conditions where surgery must be done quickly but the doctor cannot get to the operating room.
However, latency and quality-of-service issues will need to be addressed before this is anything more than experimental.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They poked tiny holes into cells with a laser. Calling that "cell surgery" doesn't make it surgery; it's just operating a scientific instrument remotely over the Internet. People have been doing that for years.
So the doctor begins adjusting the power of the beam and turns on the laser just as a lag spike hits. The computer continually increaes the laser power... then the delayed UDP message to "fire" the laser arrives...
The doctor stares bewildered at his monitor as the word HEADSHOT! is returned...
(Then a remote nurse claims he has an aimbot...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!