The Doctor Is In -- Another Country
The Doctor Is In -- Another Country
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Sept. 19, 2001 -- She was lying on the operating table and very ready to have her painful gallbladder removed. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if she could trust the robot to remove an organ while her surgeon directed the procedure from more than 4,000 miles away.
This might sound like the next episode of your favorite sci-fi flick, but this is, indeed, real. Surgeons in New York have successfully performed the world's first transoceanic operation on a 68-year-old woman in France -- in just under an hour.
Until now, techies and doctors thought that in order to do this type of long-distance surgery, they could be, at most, only a few hundred miles away. The concern is that it takes time for information to travel back and forth between doctor and operating room, and doctors didn't know how much of a delay would still allow them to operate successfully.
Would surgeons working the robotic instruments from remote sites be able to tell -- accurately -- what they were doing to a real patient who would be very far away?
The researchers first determined that an information delay of one-third of one second was acceptable. But since that amount of time doesn't leave much room for improvement, they still had to test the procedure before it would be ready for a human patient.
First, the New York surgeons confirmed the safety of this long-distance telesurgery on a French pig. Using a high-speed optical fiber network, they found that the time it actually took for the surgeon's hands to appear on their screens was only 0.155 seconds, half of the determined safety time. When all went well, they were ready to go where no one had gone before.
Two surgeons in France then set up the robotic equipment that would actually touch the patient and stood by to deactivate the technology, should something go awry. At the same time, three New York surgeons stood ready -- two to perform the surgery and another to monitor the technical side of things.
All went well, and two days later, the patient left the hospital one organ lighter.
So does this mean your next surgery might be done by the top surgeon in Europe? Well, maybe. But more importantly, this may well be the first step toward bringing top-notch medical expertise to people in areas of the world -- including the U.S. -- who might not have such resources readily available to them.
Sept. 19, 2001 -- She was lying on the operating table and very ready to have her painful gallbladder removed. As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered if she could trust the robot to remove an organ while her surgeon directed the procedure from more than 4,000 miles away.
This might sound like the next episode of your favorite sci-fi flick, but this is, indeed, real. Surgeons in New York have successfully performed the world's first transoceanic operation on a 68-year-old woman in France -- in just under an hour.
Until now, techies and doctors thought that in order to do this type of long-distance surgery, they could be, at most, only a few hundred miles away. The concern is that it takes time for information to travel back and forth between doctor and operating room, and doctors didn't know how much of a delay would still allow them to operate successfully.
Would surgeons working the robotic instruments from remote sites be able to tell -- accurately -- what they were doing to a real patient who would be very far away?
The researchers first determined that an information delay of one-third of one second was acceptable. But since that amount of time doesn't leave much room for improvement, they still had to test the procedure before it would be ready for a human patient.
First, the New York surgeons confirmed the safety of this long-distance telesurgery on a French pig. Using a high-speed optical fiber network, they found that the time it actually took for the surgeon's hands to appear on their screens was only 0.155 seconds, half of the determined safety time. When all went well, they were ready to go where no one had gone before.
Two surgeons in France then set up the robotic equipment that would actually touch the patient and stood by to deactivate the technology, should something go awry. At the same time, three New York surgeons stood ready -- two to perform the surgery and another to monitor the technical side of things.
All went well, and two days later, the patient left the hospital one organ lighter.
So does this mean your next surgery might be done by the top surgeon in Europe? Well, maybe. But more importantly, this may well be the first step toward bringing top-notch medical expertise to people in areas of the world -- including the U.S. -- who might not have such resources readily available to them.
