Linux Cluster Supercomputer Performs Surgery on Dog

An anonymous reader writes "In April, the Lonestar supercomputer, a Dell Linux Cluster with 5,840 processors at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, performed laser surgery on a dog in Houston without the intervention of a surgeon. The article describes the process: 'The treatment itself is broken into four stages: 1) Lonestar instructs the laser to heat the domain with a non-damaging calibration pulse; 2) the thermal MRI acquires baseline images of the heating and cooling of the patient's tissue for model calibration; 3) Lonestar inputs this patient-specific information and recomputes the optimal power profile for the rest of the treatments; and 4) surgery begins, with remote visualizations and evolving predictions continuing throughout the procedure.'"

The dog died.

[cduffy]

...and they bury that very far down in TFA. The question, of course, is whether that was the planned outcome; I'd like to see it answered a little more explicitly.

If it is the intended outcome... well, so be it. If not, OTOH, that makes me a little less likely to sign up to be an early human test subject. :)

Re:Awesome

[HuguesT]

Of course replacing a surgeon with a reliable fully automated robot would be great.

However your description of surgery is not correct. Surgery is difficult, minutious and different for ever patient. Great surgeons must be able to plan ahead, direct a team and control all the details of a surgery procedure as it happens, as well as improvising with a cool head for hours on end if things go wrong.

It's the exact opposite of rote procedure. Especially now with recent advances in real-time non-invasive imaging and haptic instruments procedures change all the time.

Re:The dog died.

[SUB7IME]

In medical research using animals, the animal is traditionally sacrificed for the purpose of accessing the tissue, seeing the anatomy, and gaining a more complete understanding of what actually happened during the experiment.