Telesurgery: The Link to Padua Drops and the Casablanca Operating Room Takes Over

he live surgery session of half past two was meant to show, on Wednesday September 9 in Padua, how smoothly control of a robot passes from the remote console to the local one and back. It showed something else. Dr. Youness Ahallal, who was steering from the Italian congress a prostatectomy being performed in an operating room in Casablanca, could not reconnect as quickly as he had hoped, and Dr. Hamza El Neil, who had stayed beside the patient, carried a larger part of the procedure than planned. With the link restored after a few minutes, control returned to Padua and the operation was completed, helped by an algorithm meant to smooth out jitter when the delay becomes noticeable.

The congress had made these links its central demonstration. The twenty-third meeting of the European Association of Urology’s Robotic Urology Section gathered some one thousand two hundred and fifty expected participants from September 9 to 11, around about fifty operations broadcast live, eight of them conducted at a distance: besides Casablanca, the patients lay in Warsaw, London, Athens, Aalst, Kuwait, Tashkent and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, on the MicroPort Toumai and Edge Medical platforms. What the Moroccan incident recalled fits in one line: operating from afar does not remove the team in the room, it gives that team the last word; and it is on that team, more than on the fiber, that the promise will rest.

Photo: PescediBabele, CC BY-SA 4.0.