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.'"

And they killed the dog....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Although the dog gave his life to the research, his sacrifice furthers science by allowing researchers to assess the success of the treatment and plan improvements."

Maybe next time the researchers should try it...damn vivisectionists.

Awesome

[timeOday]

For the big dollars that surgeons pull down, they are after all performing mostly rote procedures for the most part. When you can replace a decade of training a person with a simple file copy to load software on to a robot, think of the savings that represents. Health care costs are a big drag on our standard of living in all other areas and it's only getting worse. Not to mention the millions who die around the world because they simply cannot afford the procedures. I'm by no means saying this technology is ready or that I'd be willing to go under the robo-knife at this point, but I'm sure glad they're working on it.

Free software is the right tool for the job.

[westbake]

Prostate cancer is the target of the research, so your comment is closer to reality than you might like.

In this case, free software was the right tool. HPC with GNU/Linux is both flexible and mature. MD Anderson and everyone has better ways to spend their money than on software licenses for 5,000+ computers required to do this kind of work. Every kind of task will go this way eventually and most are already there. Whenever you start a task, you should look to see if some free program does not already do what you want.

Re:The dog died.

[Anonymous Coward]

Go on mate, be the first. No? Then sit down and have your nice, big, warm glass of the ol' shut the fuck up.

Re:Free software is the right tool for the job.

[willyhill]

That does not mean it's the only tool for the job. FOSS is not perfect, just like commercial software isn't always the best solution. Like in most areas, the cost of software licenses is minuscule compared to salaries, facilities, materials, etc; software is a tool regardless of whether money is charged for it or not.

I'd rather have cancer cured than agendas furthered.

Planning the surgery

[DrYak]

When you can replace a decade of training a person with a simple file copy to load software on to a robot, think of the savings that represents.

And who is going to plan the surgery ?
A doctor who has gone medical training is still required. The only thing is after a long intellectually preparation part (reflection, selecting the route, specifying the region, everything else that needs to be planned by someone with lots of experience), the doctor can give the instruction to the robot and move to the next case.

The price are going to go down. Not because you'll get rid of the doctors, but because the "planning" doctors we'll be able to handle more cases per day (and can all be grouped in specialised centres to handle the cases more efficiently)*, and then in the operating block, you'll only need to have one surgery team waiting in standby in case something goes wrong in one of the operations and needs to be finished by hand, as opposed to have one surgery team for every patient.

*: the same kind of speed up we currently have thanks to modern radiology technology and electronic archives : it pretty cool. You sit the whole day in front of a console and the exams are constantly coming in, get looked at, you quickly dictate a report and jump to the next exam, while the previous one is subsequently transmitted to a supervisor who'll double check the result. Or you read /. when there isn't as much work....