Doctors have successfully operated on a pig – from 9,300 km (5,780 miles) away. Using a video game controller, surgeons in Switzerland successfully performed an endoscopy on a pig in Hong Kong, paving the way for remote procedures in humans in areas where local expertise isn’t available.
Many common surgical procedures are already performed “remotely” in a sense – the doctor isn’t getting right up in there themselves to do a colonoscopy, after all. So if a live camera feed and movement instructions are already beamed across the room, why not do so across the world?
Now, a joint study between scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and ETH Zurich has stretched that distance to new lengths. A robotic system and a magnetic endoscope was used at the Hong Kong end, connected through a direct WebSocket protocol for real-time data transfer to a control console in Zurich. The Swiss doctor watched the procedure through a video feed, and input instructions using a video game controller.
A magnetic endoscope has a series of magnets along its length, so it can be steered by controlling a magnetic field outside the patient. This is what the surgeon in Zurich was controlling – using an old school PlayStation 3 Move wand, no less. Other demonstrations seem to have scientists use a PlayStation 5 controller, which would be much easier to come by in this decade.
This test was conducted in a sedated live pig, with the scientist able to bend the endoscope into a full U-turn and even take a useable biopsy of the animal’s stomach wall tissue. Despite the distance, latency was kept below 300 milliseconds, which is fast enough for the doctor to respond in near-real-time.
The team says that the success of this experiment shows remote surgeries could soon be done in humans. Robots are already lending surgeons a fine-tuned hand, especially in delicate organs like hearts and eyes. The ultimate goal is to help patients in remote areas, where local experts may not be available to perform such procedures. That might even include operating on astronauts in space.
The research was published in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems. The remote surgery system can be seen in action in the video below.
Source: CUHK
