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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the sorry-wrong-operation-done dept.

In 2001, a doctor in New York completed what may seem like a routine surgery to remove a patient’s gallbladder. But in fact that procedure wasn’t routine at all, because the patient was in France. That was the first successful long-distance robotic surgery, or telesurgery, ever performed, and since then the field has taken off. Though robotic surgery is not yet the industry standard, sales of medical robots are increasing by 20 percent each year, and by 2025 the Department of Defense wants to have deployable Trauma Pods ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4wjAlprgBc ) that could allow surgeons to operate on soldiers from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Though proponents of telesurgery have thoroughly discussed its benefits (there's no delay due to travel time, for example, and surgery could be possible in remote locations like deep underwater or in outer space) there hasn’t been much exploration of its weaknesses. Researchers from the University of Washington decided to put the telesurgery technology to the test to see if they are susceptible to cyber attacks. According their study, the security of surgical robots leaves much to be desired. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04339 )

http://www.popsci.com/robots-used-surgery-can-be-easily-hacked

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:36PM (#176595)

    This is pretty much the plot to Urasawa Naoki's excellent Monster [wikipedia.org] comic and animated series.

    Also the "nondescript medicare patient" is a child who may actually be the antichrist. "What happens next?" indeed.