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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.
Maybe they should queue up sets of movements that are dependent. It would also suck if the internet connection dropped right after a cut but before the bleeding could be stopped. Although I'm sure they have physical staff present in case of emergency.
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You won't have to worry about it for long. Da Vinci is almost certainly logging these surgeries for the purpose of training autonomous surgery robots.
Just like autonomous cars: in the beginning you'll only see "simple" operations automated(with supervision) but as time goes on: you'll have perfect repeatability from patient to patient.
There are plenty of third world countries where desperate people will sign up for a hair cut at a steep discount from an academy. By "hair cut" I mean "surgery" of course, and once the robots have better batting averages than the human surgeons: you'll see them integrated in first world countries like "self checkout" machines at the grocery store. E.G. 5 or so surgeries being supervised by a singly human surgeon who is present "for emergencies".
When the robots go long enough without any major intervention: the ratio of concurrent surgeries to doctors present will continue to increase until the "human surgeon" is as real as elevator inspection records. Hypothetically available, but not necessarily real as nobody from the general public ever sees them.
I have to admit, this one had me scratching my head.
Don't medical safety guidelines always require safe handling of the *worst* case scenario, not the *average* case scenario? Hospitals have network outages, and have plans in place to mitigate that. How do you mitigate a surgeon losing link while he's cutting the right ventricle? When you're yards away and the link goes down, you just scrub in. When you're on the other side of the world....
I read the article, thinking this was an incorrect claim in the summary. Nope, the article insists in several places that it was "undetectable" by the surgeons. Now, anyone who's played any online FPS knows that 50ms ping times are not only detectable, but are approaching unplayable because some punk kid that's only 10ms away from the server is always taking the head shots before you can even see him.
So I figured there has to be something else. The best hypothesis I could come up with is the current robotic surgery tools introduce their own lag such that the surgeons were unable to distinguish normal device response times from network latency. That, and the goals of a surgeon are completely different from an FPS shooter. A surgeon isn't trying to race anything or anyone - they don't have to shoot first. In a live operating theatre, they are methodical and cautious. It's not like there are sudden surprises that leap out at them that they have to instantly react to. Even a burst blood vessel takes a few moments to assess and plan a recovery from. So maybe if they're used to very slow approach, the latency doesn't impact them as much.
John