• Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    That’s a lot of latency with regards to surgery. The robots themselves are designed to have almost none to keep it as safe as a similar laparoscopic procedure. The tech is good but there needs to be less latency before any regulator would approve this

    Historically, surgical robots were funded by the pentagon as a project to perform remote surgeries in a battlefield. Latency made that project fail, but refined the tech used in modern surgical robotics

    • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      The tech is good but there needs to be less latency before any regulator would approve this

      To this idiot 100ms doesn’t seem like a lot, are surgeons really operating on like jet fighter levels here? Going by feelings alone I feel like “do it 20% slower to not cut an artery due to 100ms delay” seems like a huge step up from “Nobody is there to save you, RIP bud”

      Genuinely curious, can you elaborate here?

      • not an expert but i believe there is an element of haptic feedback with these surgery robotics so you can ‘feel’ what you are doing and how much resistance there is to your actions, imagine trying to cut next to an artery without being able to feel when you are about to cut into it until 100ms late for example. even more difficult if the system relies on pure visual input to the surgeon with no haptics information.

        • Coolkidbozzy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          there is an element of haptic feedback with these surgery robotics so you can ‘feel’ what you are doing and how much resistance there is to your actions, imagine trying to cut next to an artery without being able to feel when you are about to cut into it until 100ms late for example

          Exactly this. Only in the last few months haptic feedback is beginning to roll out on some instruments for the latest da vinci system, which is the most popular surgical robot of this kind (they did surgery on a grape). No other robots that I’m aware of have haptic feedback yet, and visual ‘haptics’ are all robotic surgeons traditionally have.

          Minimal feedback is the main drawback of robots vs any other type of surgery, and increasing latency increases the risk of accidentally harming the patient. I’m sure 5G doesn’t necessarily have big spikes in ping which could be disastrous, but it’s riskier than the traditional cable directly connecting the surgeon to the robot in the same room