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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?
Who knew it would hit the hospital operating rooms so quickly?
I'm getting this image of a heart surgeon listening to canned music on Comcast's help line. "Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line for another three days and...".
If a surgeon doesn't have the hand eye coordination to notice 150ms delay, I do not want him operating on me.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
Now even doctors are spending all their time playing online video games.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Better hope they're not using Concast! Just imagine. Latency goes into seconds during surgery, equipment stops working because of poor signal and your patient's blood winds up all over the floor because too many people are streaming Netflix? (Surgeon) My patient is dying! At the other end of the phone, "press 1 for English..."
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.
If this becomes remotely commonplace someone is going to get murdered when Comcast mistakes one of these transmissions for a Netflix packet and throttles it up past 3 or 4 seconds. Personally, I think it would be poetic justice if Ted Cruz dies this way.
but when you're playing World of Tanks, 50ms is the difference between getting the first shot in and losing.
I would not want anything with comparable or worse lag poking around inside me particularly when the one thing that the whole shebang relies on (POWER) is the one thing that's out of control of any person directly involved in the operation.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Are they _really_ trying to do this over conventional global Internet backbone? I sincerely hope not. It is simply not reliable enough, and WILL experience drop-outs, latency spikes, and other disruptions due to all kinds of different scenarios.
You CAN buy non-Internet data links you know. There is lots of dark fiber available for this kind of thing and providers willing to sell it. It may be expensive, but at least it's not a miserable failure of a design and taking extreme chances with surgery.
At least they're not using UDP.
Next is holograms lawyers in courtrooms!!!
Please state the nature of the legal proceeding...
Lose = not win
Talk about a dead link.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Wow. "How'd he die?" "Lag." Been true plenty of times in World of Warcraft, and now possible IRL.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Why won't slashdot cover the sourceforge malware scandal?
Oh, yeah, that's why.
SHAME ON YOU DICE!
For your upcoming remote surgery, please note that fast Internet response times ensure an effective procedure with the best post-operative outcomes. Your insurance carrier, however, covers only basic Internet service. If you wish, you may elect to have faster guaranteed response times for an additional fee. Please select from one of the following four options:
1. 500ms response time $500.00
2. 250ms response time $750.00
3 100ms response time $2000.00
4. 50ms response time $5000.00
Sincerely, AT&T
We Appreciate Your Patronage
Next is holograms lawyers in courtrooms!!!
Don't fret. Congress is staffed almost entirely by lawyers, and there is zero chance they'll let their bread-and-butter be outsourced or replaced by machines. They already won't even pass laws to simplify laws, in order to keep their jobs as clever interpreters of the cracks between the laws.
They'll damn everyone else to a subcontracted devil running an outsourced version of hell, but they've proven they're going to protect their jobs forever.
John
Looks like you're the next group to get your jobs outsourced.
When I talked to one of our VAR's he said that one of the local hospital chains was one of his best and worst customers, best because of all the expensive gear they bought, worst because they were so demanding. They actually paid to have trenching done to make sure that their backup link at one facility went out a different CO which was on a different uplink facility (ie truly divergent paths with no single mode of failure), and that was just for PACS, not telesurgery.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Surgery is a scary thing. Having robots or remote surgeons makes us nervous because it amplifies the unknowns. We are already very good at imagining bad what-if scenarios in these situations.
Likely if lag times become too great the machines will go into a safe mode until a better connection is restored, and yes there may be unlikely/unlucky scenarios where the patent dies from not being able to receive timely treatment/intervention because no qualified surgeon is close by. Of course thousands if not hundreds of thousands (millions?) already die from less than ideal surgeries at the hands of all too fallible doctors. All doctors are fallible, it is a spectrum of very competent (and yet still human) to incompetent.
Likely autonomous robotic surgery and remote surgery (and various hybrids of the two) are the wave of the future. A future many don’t want, but largely for naked fear of the unknown. Ideally quality of care will go up, access to care will go up, cost will go down (though not initially while we work out the kinks) .
Ideally automated (and largely infallible) robots will conduct the majority of surgeries and an elite squad of human surgeons will be on stand by to take over if the robot gets into trouble (though this will still be done remotely). Longer term the elite surgeons will be needed less and less until unneeded completely.
ER facilities will morph into prep-banks to stabilize patents just long enough for them to be worked on by the remotely guided or autonomous robots they keep nearby. Stabilization my include emergency cooling the body (induced hypothermia) so the patent can live long enough to receive remote care.
Patients with deadly communicable decreases will be able to receive surgery without major risks to hospital staff.
It will all be quite unnerving to witness, but what surgical intervention isn’t? If statistically lives are saved, then this is the way to go. Doing the right thing in medicine often involves overcoming a yuck factor.
Letter To Iran
I don't think Texas surgeons are going to be properly trained in the procedure to remove the alligator you stapled to your face during a meth binge.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
..."Ping of Death".
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I would expect much like digital telephony lag is not much of challenge to overcome unless its really really big.
Jitter would be a problem. The human brain is pretty good at adapting to consistent latency, anticipating events, delaying or cramming inputs as required to compensate. Where that breaks down is when the latenecy is sometimes 200ms and other-times 500ms without predictability. Controlling jitter on the public parts of the Internet is hard.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I work in DR Architecture, and diverse routes are a pretty common customer request, and for us that just means diverse routes from the customer's IT facility to our DR data canters. Industrial firms, banks, health insurance companies, whatever.
The hospital didn't show that normal lagtime won't affect remote robotic surgeries. It looked for possible effects of that sort and didn't find any. That's a good result, but it's only the start of a process that might show that doing this is reasonably safe for patients.
The real world is much more demanding and uncontrollable than simulation. Remember the Therac-25 incident. Thorough functional testing apparently showed that the machine was perfectly safe; it didn't take into account the difference between testers and people who would actually be using the device every day. While you can never prove the non-existence of some unknown and unpredictable factor, that doesn't mean that a long and critical search for things you might have overlooked is useless.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Wires like these (even for my business - an OC3 in new construction) go and stay fully underground coming up through a chase in the basement/floor, it could be cut inside but that is why internal security of your data is important. If the hospital is doing this they have IT there all the time - and security. It is unlikely (not impossible) that they will have an issue with anything you are worried about. They also use disparate connections with failover built in I suspect.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
how about dealing with the bottle-neck and not say "we don't need Internet anyway."
Your surgical procedure will continue in 60 seconds. Meanwhile please enjoy this brief in-stream advertisement.
Wha?! Where's the "Skip This Ad" button? Wha?!
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