Medical first: surgeon in New York uses robot to operate on patient in France

by Angela Doland
The Associated Press

PARIS – A surgical team in New York has performed a gallbladder operation on a patient in France by sending high-speed signals to robots - an advance made possible by improvements in telecommunications, doctors announced yesterday.

Dr. Jacques Marescaux of France's Research Institute Against Cancers of the Digestive Tract was in Manhattan for the Sept. 7 operation, watching the patient on a screen and using tools hooked up to sensors.

The instructions sped more than 4,000 miles from New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center across the Atlantic through fiber-optic lines, to robots that operated on a 68-year-old woman in Strasbourg, France. The patient had no complications and was released from the hospital two days later.

The procedure was announced at a news conference in Paris yesterday and is to be described in the Sept. 27 issue of the science journal Nature.

For two and a half years, technicians from French telecommunications group France Telecom worked to find a way to transmit a sharp image long-distance with almost no lag time - and no chance of communications breaking down.

The signals sped through the fiber-optic network with an average delay of 150 milliseconds.