GÉANT2 PERT contributes to success of live tele-surgery between India, Korea and Japan
Thursday 15 May 2008, Cambridge, UK: A training event on liver surgery held on 28-29 April at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India, featured a live laparoscopic tele-surgery session performed by Prof. Ho-Seong Han at the Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in Korea. Thanks to a fast and reliable network connection, the surgery event was streamed live to the training venue in Mumbai allowing immediate interaction between the trainees and Prof. Han. An additional medical team at Kyushu University Hospital, Japan, led by Dr Shuji Shimizu, had a ‘tele-presence’ and gave feedback on the procedure – making this remote surgical training session across three countries a unique learning experience for the course attendees in Mumbai. “We had over 220 participants in the audience, and they were spellbound by the quality of the transmission and surgery,” commented Dr Parul Shukla at Tata Memorial Hospital.
DANTE played an active role in making this event a success. When the tele-surgery team found problems on the network path between Kyushu University and the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, their concerns were passed to the GEANT2 PERT who has experience in investigating such issues. Working with the other involved networks (APAN-JP, TEIN2, and the Indian R&E network ERNET) the GÉANT2 PERT Manager, DANTE’s Toby Rodwell, determined that the circuit between Milan and Mumbai was being heavily used for grid computing traffic. When informed of the tele-surgery event the grid computer centres kindly agreed to re-route their traffic, which freed up 30Mbps of capacity (exactly the amount needed for the tele-surgery).
The PERT case could be closed and marked as ‘fully successful’ and similar live tele-surgical events are planned in the near future - not least in anticipation of ERNET’s involvement in TEIN3.
