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Florida Hospital Shows Normal Internet Lag Time Won't Affect Remote Robotic Surgeries
Lucas123 writes: Remote robotic surgery performed hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the physician at the controls is possible and safe, according to the Florida Hospital that recently tested Internet lag times for the technology. Roger Smith, CTO at the Florida Hospital Nicholson Center in Celebration, Fla., said the hospital tested the lag time to a partner facility in Ft. Worth, Texas and found it ranged from 30 to 150 milliseconds, which surgeons could not detect as they moved remote robotic laparoscopic instruments. The tests, performed using a surgical simulator called a Mimic, will now be performed as if operating remotely in Denver and then Loma Linda, Calif. The Mimic Simulator system enables virtual procedures performed by a da Vinci robotic surgical system, the most common equipment in use today; it's used for hundreds of thousands of surgeries every year around the world. With a da Vinci system, surgeons today can perform operations yards away from a patient, even in separate but adjoining rooms to the OR. By stretching that distance to tens, hundreds or thousands of miles, the technology could enable patients to receive operations from top surgeons that would otherwise not be possible, including wounded soldiers near a battlefield. The Mimic Simulator was able to first artificially dial up lag times, starting with 200 milliseconds all the way up to 600 milliseconds.
Sounds good until you hit a latency spike. I'd hate to be getting sutured up and see the ping times climb to 2000 ms.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
How are DoS attacks going to be handled?
How is the data encrypted? (ECC I hope)
What about viruses? Is a Windows PC being used in the doctors office to communicate or are these actual real time embedded systems?
Even 1 mile away scares me.
What happens when a router between the two buildings goes down for 12 hours in the middle of open heart surgery and the surgeon is 2 hours away?
Who is liable for accidental death? The ISP, the doctor on site? The remote doctor? The robotics company?
Florida Hospital Shows Normal Internet Lag Time Won't Affect Remote Robotic Surgeries
So what? It's not normal lag you are worried about. It's severe lag which on the normal internet you cannot guarantee you can eliminate. It's interesting information but I'm not sure if it's really useful information.
I'm guessing it isn't noticeable because of how slowly and deliberately they move to begin with. Surgery isn't exactly a twitch reflexes exercise.
The brain adapts very well to lag. If you rig up a button and a light, so the light lights up when you push the button, then gradually introduce a delay, the brain will - up to a certain point - adapt and you'll still think the button push and light are happening at the same time. Remove the delay without warning, and you'll be convinced that the light lit up before you pushed the button.
Surgery isn't like a first-person shooter, cries of "but the lag!" notwithstanding. Surgeons aren't, for the most part, waiting for the right bit of aorta to bob into their crosshairs so they can jab it with a scalpel, nor are they competing against other surgeons to get the first stitch in.
Of course spikes in lag - and connections dropping entirely - are a big concern. But I don't think anyone's suggesting hospitals all move to remote working just because they can just yet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I hope you never need surgery then, since the typical delay between observing something and *starting* to react to it is an order of magnitude *larger* than your stated maximum. And that's for a *local* observer who is already hands on. [1]
Of course, since *typical* internet lag (on a connection *not* routed through a satellite) is in the neighborhood of 30-150ms (round trip), you're still not in any actual danger since lags an order of magnitude higher than that didn't effect the surgical process.
Seriously, if you think 1/100th of a second (10 ms) actually means anything in surgery, you're either severely mistaken, or no patient has ever survived a surgical procedure where anything unexpected has happened. Since we know the latter isn't true, we can state with confidence that you are mistaken.
[1] The average reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds to a visual stimulus, 0.17 for an audio stimulus, and 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus. (That's 250ms, 170ms, and 150ms respectively.)