Brain Surgery Robot Running Linux

hherb writes "Singapore has developed a robotic brain surgeon. The interesting bit: based on a Linux platform. Well, what else? Who in his right mind would like to have his brain fondled by a MS product?"

Heh

[Lebannen]

Anothe nicely misleading title... after reading the article, the robot is used to drill through the porous bone of the skull. This is no mean feat by itself, reducing a 6-hour drill to a 3-hour drill, but surgeons still have to feed the robot all information on blood vessels, nerves, and sensitive areas.

That being said, it's still pretty impressive. And I thought dentists were bad enough...

Utility only

[BuR4N]

"The programmers can then map the access path, program the robotic arm to hold the drilling tool and begin the surgery. The program is written on a Linux platform."

Looks like the "setup" program is written for some Linux distro , no actual surgery is done using a machine running Linux.

I would neither have Bill or Linus software poking around in my head, neither OS is deterministic or suited for an operation like that.

Wouldn't want it done with Linux either

[Junks Jerzey]

Critical life-and-death embedded stuff like this a whole different world than the desktop. You don't want things like virtual memory paging and so on. You need realtime guarantees from all system calls. You need everything to be completely understandable by a single person. In short, you don't want to be running an OS at all. You want something very small, very understandable, and very reliable. Consumer-type OSes are misplaced here. Linux is only marginally better than embedded Windows in this respect.

One evening, for example, Linus is tired and doesnt merge a patch properly. No one notices this...until there's a surgical accident. The whole set-up is completely wrong.

Re:Right Mind

[ProlificSage]

People generally have brain surgery because their mind is malfunctioning.

No, psychiatrists are used when the mind is malfunctioning, but the brain itself may not require surgery. Brain surgeons are used when there is something wrong with the brain that can only be corrected by surgery, such as a tumor. A condition such as that may not necessarily cause a malfunction of the mind, it could be causing physical symptoms instead, such as headaches, paralysis, etc. So, it is possible to be in your right mind and still require brain surgery. In which case, I'd feel more comfortable with Linux. The question, of course, then becomes, "Which distribution do you trust most to drill into your skull?"

As an aside, Microsoft's motto for a similar product would probably be, "Where do you want to drill today?" :-)

It's not run on a linux platform

[ilsie]

It's coded on a linux platform. I'm sure they're using some kind of custom RTOS, which would be much more suitable for this kind of task.