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Linux Cluster Supercomputer Performs Surgery on Dog
An anonymous reader writes "In April, the Lonestar supercomputer, a Dell Linux Cluster with 5,840 processors at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, performed laser surgery on a dog in Houston without the intervention of a surgeon. The article describes the process: 'The treatment itself is broken into four stages: 1) Lonestar instructs the laser to heat the domain with a non-damaging calibration pulse; 2) the thermal MRI acquires baseline images of the heating and cooling of the patient's tissue for model calibration; 3) Lonestar inputs this patient-specific information and recomputes the optimal power profile for the rest of the treatments; and 4) surgery begins, with remote visualizations and evolving predictions continuing throughout the procedure.'"
I for one welcome our new shark-controlling surgical supercomputer overlords.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
welcome our new robotic surgeon overlords.
Wow, how about bowing down before a cluster of those? Heheh. Mixing the memes, sorry...
Automated, computerized surgery, but "linux" is the important part.
...and they bury that very far down in TFA. The question, of course, is whether that was the planned outcome; I'd like to see it answered a little more explicitly.
:)
If it is the intended outcome... well, so be it. If not, OTOH, that makes me a little less likely to sign up to be an early human test subject.
Let me know when they do that on a penguin!
"Although the dog gave his life to the research, his sacrifice furthers science by allowing researchers to assess the success of the treatment and plan improvements."
Maybe next time the researchers should try it...damn vivisectionists.
For the big dollars that surgeons pull down, they are after all performing mostly rote procedures for the most part. When you can replace a decade of training a person with a simple file copy to load software on to a robot, think of the savings that represents. Health care costs are a big drag on our standard of living in all other areas and it's only getting worse. Not to mention the millions who die around the world because they simply cannot afford the procedures. I'm by no means saying this technology is ready or that I'd be willing to go under the robo-knife at this point, but I'm sure glad they're working on it.
"... the dog gave his life to the research, his sacrifice furthers science... "
Would you trust your surgery to a Dell computer?
Please tag "linuxkillsdogs". The dog died. If this were a Microsoft product, the dog would have lived. You open source freaks are just evil.
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Wait...I don't get it. Did the dog die before or after the surgery? Was it already dead ahead of time in order to be immobile?
If only it was a PowerPC cluster!
Yellow Dog Linux distro home page.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Prostate cancer is the target of the research, so your comment is closer to reality than you might like.
In this case, free software was the right tool. HPC with GNU/Linux is both flexible and mature. MD Anderson and everyone has better ways to spend their money than on software licenses for 5,000+ computers required to do this kind of work. Every kind of task will go this way eventually and most are already there. Whenever you start a task, you should look to see if some free program does not already do what you want.
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..., will in vitro fertilization than be like having sex with a robot?
Should have read Yellow Dog operates on yellow dog.
No existe.
This sounds like one of the first steps in creating an autodoc from Larry Niven's books. Basically a box (coffin) you put someone in, close the lid and wait for it to fix them. It contains full life support, can perform surgery and produce (cloning?) it's own replacement parts.
Of more immediate use, this sort of thing could be very useful for situations where surgeons are not available. Ships at sea, trips to Mars, NHS hospitals with long waiting lists...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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A doctor who has gone medical training is still required. The only thing is after a long intellectually preparation part (reflection, selecting the route, specifying the region, everything else that needs to be planned by someone with lots of experience), the doctor can give the instruction to the robot and move to the next case.
The price are going to go down. Not because you'll get rid of the doctors, but because the "planning" doctors we'll be able to handle more cases per day (and can all be grouped in specialised centres to handle the cases more efficiently)*, and then in the operating block, you'll only need to have one surgery team waiting in standby in case something goes wrong in one of the operations and needs to be finished by hand, as opposed to have one surgery team for every patient.
*: the same kind of speed up we currently have thanks to modern radiology technology and electronic archives : it pretty cool. You sit the whole day in front of a console and the exams are constantly coming in, get looked at, you quickly dictate a report and jump to the next exam, while the previous one is subsequently transmitted to a supervisor who'll double check the result. Or you read
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Jokes about killer file systems are like cars with missing passenger seats.
Does this qualify as a Beowoof Cluster?
Anybody want my mod points?
Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey
Sounds like a real killer app.
From the article it sounds like the real development is combining thermal MR and thermal ablation therapy with a computer to give you more confidence that you've properly heated the whole target. The computer doesn't do any cutting. It doesn't make the incision, or sew it back up.
If you want to consider what it does surgery then you really should include radiotherapy treatments that have been computer controlled for years.
Ah yes, blame the fact that they ran a program on an open source operating system. It looks to me like the software that ran the surgical operation wasn't open source at all. It seems it was all closed source software that was doing anything except running the computers. Although I am a bit lost; I don't seem to remember when Microsoft went into the medical field.
linux computers doe it take to KILL a dog?
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It was a joke. Really.
I failed to take that into account. Maybe because I live in a country which has already done massive effort to reduce recovery time, thank to less invasive surgery (nothing fancy requiring robots. Just simply using *-scopy instead of *-tomy procedure whenever possible).
Thus, for me, the introduction of robots, both classical surgical and new autonomous one, doesn't translate into shorter hospitalisation times. The procedure that our new overlords are going to replace where already minimally invasive in the first place.
It's more about convenience for the surgeon :
- tentacle-like robots are able to follow organ movement
- remotely controllable bots allow to receive help from great specialists without needing to fly them at the destination first.
- programmable autonomous (like TFA's surgery both, or like the cancer-killing radiation-machine used for some time) allow very careful planning of complicated or delicate procedure and then being sure that the procedure will be carried exactly as planned (well - except for that scandal about the miscalibrated radiation-machine)
about MRI visits' cost : they also depend on the financing plan adopted by the institute.
I've heard that some constructors subsidize the cost of the machine but in exchange require a "tax" on all performed exams.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The "New You" cosmetic surgery laser gone haywire in "Logan's Run" comes to mind. On the other hand, can I get one of these to melt snow on the road a few centimeters in front of my 70MPH tires? How many development cycles before 5,840 processors will fit in my glove box?
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