Tele-surgery Experiment between Japan-Thailand using a High-speed Network

Abstract

The use of the conventional network infrastructures is essential for future wide use of tele-surgery applications. In this paper, a tele-surgery experiment, which was conducted between Japan and Thailand by using the developed minimally invasive surgical system is described. The direct distance between master and slave sites was 3750km. A high speed Internet, JGN2 (Japan Gigabit Network 2) was used as an information transmission channel. In the experiment, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy was successfully performed on a pig. The network time-delays of robot and images were 62.4 ms and 270.0 ms respectively (one way in average). The time-delay of image was shortened by introducing a newly developed low latency CODEC despite of the longer distance compared with the past tele-surgery experiments.