A remote surgery experiment between Japan and Thailand over Internet using a low latency CODEC system

Abstract

Remote surgery is one of the most desired applications in the context of recent advanced medical technologies. For a future expansion of remote surgery, it is important to use conventional network infrastructures such as Internet. However, using such conventional network infrastructures, we are confronting time-delay problems of data transmission. In this paper, a remote surgery experiment between Japan and Thailand using a research and development Internet is presented. In the experiment, the image and audio information was transmitted by a newly developed low latency CODEC system to shorten the time-delay. By introducing the low latency CODEC system, the time-delay was shortened compared with the past remote surgery experiments despite the longer distance. We also conducted several network measurements such as a comparison between TCP/IP and UDP/IP about the control signal transmission.