Reappraisal of telesurgery in the era of high‐speed, high‐bandwidth, secure communications: Evaluation of surgical performance in local and remote environments

Aim Communication and video transmission delays negatively affect telerobotic surgery. Since latency varies by communication environment and robot, to realize remote surgery, both must perform well. This study aims to examine the feasibility of telerobotic surgery by validating the communication environment and local/remote robot operation, using secure commercial lines and newly developed robots. Methods Hirosaki University and Mutsu General Hospital, 150 km apart, were connected via a Medicaroid surgical robot. Ten surgeons performed a simple task remotely using information encoding and decoding. The required bandwidth, delay time, task completion time, number of errors, and image quality were evaluated. Next, 11 surgeons performed a complex task using gallbladder and intestinal models in local/remote environments; round trip time (RTT), packet loss, time to completion, operator fatigue, operability, and image were observed locally and remotely. Results Image quality was not so degraded as to affect remote robot operation. Median RTT was 4 msec (2‐12), and added delay was 29 msec. There was no significant difference in accuracy or number of errors for cholecystectomy, intestinal suturing, completion time, surgeon fatigue, or image evaluation. Conclusion The fact that remote surgery succeeded equally to local surgery showed that this system has the necessary elemental technology for widespread social implementation. This study aims to examine the feasibility of telerobotic surgery by validating the communication environment and local/remote robot operation. The performance of remote surgery over a commercial line was equivalent to that of the local environment. Therefore, remote surgery using a commercial line can be performed safely, indicating that we have the elemental technology necessary for social implementation of telerobotic surgery.