Darren Porras

Telesurgery represents the next frontier for delivering medical procedures with unmatched quality and consistency to remote and under-served areas. These telesurgery systems represent a complex interplay of robotic systems, communication infrastructure and real-time control systems.

Yet technical challenges are impacting the reliability, precision and adoption of remote surgery. In particular, system latency must be addressed in order to achieve the necessary clinical precision with high-fidelity haptic feedback and real-time movement replication. The ability to capture, process, and rapidly analyze vast amounts of data (real-time visual feeds, instrument kinematics, patient physiological data, etc) is crucial for providing surgeons with comprehensive situational awareness. Traditional communication architectures are bottlenecked by communication uncertainty, introducing latency and jitter that affect haptic realism and system stability.

System latency can be addressed by a new architectural approach: data centricity. Using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard, this shifts the architectural focus from traditional message-passing models to a conceptual Global Data Space. DDS allows multiple subsystems (surgeon console, patient-side robot, imaging sensors, monitoring devices) to asynchronously publish and subscribe to specific data (e.g., control commands, haptic feedback, 4K video feeds) in real-time. It also uses robust Quality of Service (QoS) policies to enforce the predictability and ultra-low latency required for human-safe surgical operations.

Attendees will learn how data-centricity works to meet the rapid, reliable communication requirements for the next generation of clinically-viable telesurgery systems.