Researchers from University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and UI Health are “challenging accepted beliefs about telesurgery” as a result of a $9 million project with the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
According to UIC, “the researchers believe telesurgery — a surgeon operating on a patient in a different physical location using robotic systems, high-speed data connections and real-time telecommunications — will not only improve care for combat soldiers, but also improve health outcomes in rural communities.”
UI Health transplant surgeon Stephen Bartlett, principal investigator of the project with the Uniformed Services University for Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., said beliefs about “maximum latency” in telesurgery — “the time between the surgeon’s hand movement and the robot’s corresponding action on a patient,” writes UIC — have “never been rigorously tested. A more precise determination of what time lag is acceptable could advance telesurgery, as concerns about latency have slowed its development.”
Dr. Bartlett cited “speculative pronouncements in the surgical literature” that place maximum tolerable latency at 150 milliseconds. “But when you start to read the literature, it’s just conjecture,” he told UIC. “Nobody had done any real experiments to say what latency is tolerable.” Through the project, he and his team found that surgeons “could skillfully perform surgery even when the latency was extended to 378 milliseconds.”
That’s a big deal, because the project focused on preparations to “manage combat casualties in the South China Sea” through “a satellite-based connection,” stated Dr. Bartlett. But UIC and Dr. Bartlett note that the research also has “implications” for rural medicine, specifically by addressing shortages of general surgeons in rural areas, as well as reducing costs and patient travel times to access surgical care. Dr. Bartlett stated that “the big opportunity in telerobotics is in rural medicine,” and that “telerobotics is a solution to the rural healthcare problem.”
UIC notes that from 2001 to 2019, the number of surgeons in rural areas fell by 29%, and about 60% of rural counties had zero active general surgeons in 2019. These statistics likely haven’t improved over the last seven years. Dr. Bartlett and fellow UI Health transplant surgeon Enrico Benedetti, MD, who co-leads UI Health’s robotic surgery program, are exploring opportunities to use telesurgery in rural health care, including the feasibility of remotely connecting UIC surgeons to five rural hospitals in Illinois.
Read UIC’s full article on the subject here.
