Telesurgery refers to the practice of using robotic tools to perform surgery as opposed to traditional laproscopic tools or open surgery. Remote telesurgery furthers this idea by allowing the surgeon and the patient to be very far from each other, even as far as thousands of miles.
Notably, remote telesurgery has already succeeded as a proof of concept. In 2001, Dr. Jacques Marescaux was able to perform a gall bladder surgery on a patient in France while he was in New York. Since then, Dr. Mehran Anvari has performed many sucessful remote telesurgeries in Canada. Both of these examples used private networks, which do not scale well and are not cost effective.
The da Vinci robot has become the de facto telesurgical device. It consists of two parts, the surgeon's console and the patient side. Commands are sent from the surgeon's console to the patient side and video data is sent from the patient side to the surgeon's side. The demanding part of this application is sending both these signals with high reliability and low latency, over normal internet (not private networks).
In this project we investigated how to provide remote telesurgery with the reliability needed for surgery, while maintaining extremely low latencies. We used the LTN overlay network to send video data from one location to another with high reliability and low latency.