9/20 NY Times Article: Gagner, Mt. Sinai, REALLY remote lap gallbladder surgery

September 20, 2001

Remote Gallbladder Operation Spans 3,800 Miles

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Find additional information by selecting from the following topics.

Robots

Surgery and Surgeons

Anatomy and Physiology

Fiber Optics

ARIS, Sept. 19 (AP) - Surgeons in New York have performed a gallbladder

operation on a patient in France by remote control, sending high-speed signals

to robotic surgical tools, doctors announced today.

The doctors say it is the first complete surgery done with a robot controlled by

doctors thousands of miles away. Doctors at the s Hopkins University in

Baltimore had previously conducted part of a kidney operation on a patient in

Rome.

Robotic surgery holds the promise of letting doctors operate remotely, on

soldiers on battlefields or even astronauts in space. It means that patients may

eventually have access to top surgeons without having to travel.

The problem has been telecommunications, eliminating delays between a surgeon's

order to a robot to move and when the robot obeyed, as well as making sure that

surgeons at the remote site saw clear images of the operation under way.

For the gallbladder operation, the problem was solved by a fiber optic link

developed by France Télécom that let signals arrive with an average delay of 150

milliseconds. The robotic system, called Zeus, was made by Computer Motion Inc.

of Goleta, Calif.

Dr. Jacques Marescaux of the Research Institute Against Cancers of the Digestive

Tract in France performed the operation on Sept. 7 from an office in Manhattan

that had telecommunications equipment and tools linked to sensors. Dr. Michel

Gagner, chief of laparoscopic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, joined him. The

medical team had performed the same procedure on pigs.

The 68-year-old patient, in Strasbourg, had no complications and was released

from the hospital in two days.

The procedure was announced at a news conference here and is to be described in

the Sept. 27 issue of the journal Nature.

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