Remote surgery speedier thanks to new network

Shandong province is promoting deeper integration of its deterministic network to upgrade the networking and smartening of industrial manufacturing.

The province has put a high-quality 5,600-kilometer deterministic network－with backbone nodes in 16 cities－into service, Liu Yunjie, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said last month at the founding ceremony of the Shandong Future Network Research Institute in the province's capital Jinan.

With its low latency, low jitter, low packet loss, high reliability and high bandwidth service, the province's large-scale deterministic network is being used in several areas, including remote surgery, autonomous driving and supercomputing.

Niu Haitao, deputy head of the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, tried out the network at the institute.

He undertook remote laparoscopic surgery on a test pig by controlling robotic arms linked to the deterministic network.

Within 20 minutes, the surgeon had removed a kidney from the pig, which was located 350 km away.

"The lag on the deterministic network is between five and six milliseconds, which ensured that the surgery went well," he said.

Niu and his team have been conducting minimally invasive remote surgeries since 2019.

To date, they have operated on 50 patients in 10 counties and districts in Shandong. "All 50 patients have recovered and are in stable and healthy condition," he said.

During the first surgery undertaken in September 2019, the network lag was around 50 milliseconds, which fell to around 30 milliseconds once the network was supported by 5G.

"The newly developed deterministic network has reduced lag substantially, which is crucial to remote surgeries, especially when surgeons have to correct mistakes during operations," Niu said.

Qian Jun, a researcher at the institute, said the network is also being used in mining and supercomputing.

Shandong ticks all 41 industrial boxes in the United Nations' industrial classification standards, providing abundant applications for a deterministic network, according to the Shandong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology.

To meet the different needs of the industrial sector, the future network research institute will have 500 people working on researching and developing the network within five years, it said.