The future of surgery could be remote. Doctors in China successfully directed a team hundreds of kilometres away to perform heart surgery using a 5G mobile internet connection. This follows on from a surgeon who recently used the same technology to remotely control a surgical robot during a procedure.
The appeal of long-distance surgery is that the leading specialist can help with or even intervene in operations far away from where they live. But听having a reliable and fast enough connection has been a stumbling block.
On 3 April, cardiologist Huiming Guo directed surgery on a 41-year-old woman who had a hole in her heart due to a birth defect. Guo was in Guangdong General Hospital in Guangzhou, whilst the patient was in Gaozhou People鈥檚 Hospital about 400 kilometers away.
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Before the procedure, Guo鈥檚 team worked out a surgical plan based on a 3D model of the defected heart. The model was put together by an artificial intelligence听using medical images such as CT and MRI scans and then 3D printed, according to a press conference held on Wednesday in Guangzhou.
Guo and his colleagues gave instructions, such as where to make cuts and stitches, through video conference to the operating team whilst watching a live-stream from the operating room in 4K鈥攗ltra-high definition. The team also monitored the procedure via a live video from a camera probe inserted through the patient鈥檚 chest and heart ultrasound. The surgery lasted 4 hours.
鈥淎dvanced internet technology can save our doctors a lot of time because they don鈥檛 have to travel as much. They can use that time to safe more lives,鈥� said Zhiwei Zhang at Guangdong General Hospital in a press conference.
Distant robots
The 5G network used by the hospital is 10 times faster than the 4G mobile internet currently in use, which leads to more stable streaming.
鈥淲e鈥檝e been doing [these type of surgeries] through just Skype calls,鈥� says T. Sloane Guy at Weill Cornell Medicine, New York. But 5G allowed them to transmit multiple visual materials clearly at the same time, which gave both surgical teams more certainty, he says.
Others are also using the technique.听Doctors wanting to learn about a procedure in the Second People鈥檚 Hospital in Guangdong, used 5G to watch a stream from Yangshan Hospital in Guangdong, 200 kilometres away.
And recently, neurosurgeon Zhipei Ling used a surgical robot to insert a deep brain stimulation implant into someone with Parkinson鈥檚 disease. The surgeon was located in Hainan, while the patient was in Beijing on the other side of the country. Ling works at both hospitals, but at the time when his patient needed a surgery, he couldn鈥檛 fly to Beijing immediately.
A hospital in Barcelona and one in Munich have also planned to test 5G aided surgeries before 2020.
Besides China, many countries have been testing 5G at trial sites, such as the US, the UK, Brazil, Sweden and Korea. Most of them plan to widely roll out 5G in the next two years.
In many isolated areas, surgeons often need to perform surgeries across different specialties that they are not trained for. So, being able to receive clear instructions from experts regardless of where they are would be helpful, says Ghassan Abu-Sittah at the American University of Beirut Medical Centre.
One major benefit of 5G is its reduction in signal delay, from 20 to 80 milliseconds with 4G to about 1 millisecond with 5G, says Rahim Tafazolli at the University of Surrey in Guilford.
Such a decrease is less important when there are human doctors on both ends, but it will make a huge difference during telesurgery, when a doctor operates remotely with a robot. This is what the future of healthcare will look like, says Guy.
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Article amended on 6 April 2019
We corrected the date of the operation performed at Guangdong General Hospital and the details of the听surgery听in the Second People鈥檚 Hospital in Guangdong. We also corrected the details of the brain surgery performed from听Beijing.
