Jun 06 2008
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Prostate Surgery Performed by Supercomputer
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A supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center has piloted a laser to perform prostate surgery on a dog.
The operation was done in Houston without the aid of a human surgeon. The Lonestar supercomputer (a Dell Linux Cluster with 5,840 processors) was in Austin at the time. The procedure was the result of three years of research and development of the algorithms, computer codes, imaging technology, and cyberinfrastructure.
Of note: They consider the surgery a success, but the dog did die. Researchers are confident that their approach could lead to specific treatments in five to ten years for humans. They actually think this is the future of surgery - a combination of engineering tools and medicine.
Above is an image of the peer to peer communication architecture that was used to control the laser treatment process. Feedback control was achieved by the continual interaction of the data, compute, and visualization modules.
The communications between Austin and Houston were essential for the success of the operation. The surgery was occurring in Houston on the dog, and the laser was being controlled in Austin the entire time. The data was orchestrated so every time a new set of thermal images was sent from Houston to Austin, the power control for the next five seconds was sent from Austin to Houston, and that’s how it was done for the entire surgery.
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