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.'"

New Robot Overlords

Wow, how about bowing down before a cluster of those? Heheh. Mixing the memes, sorry...

The dog died.

...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:The dog died.

Second. I for one would like to know whether the dog died because of the treatment, in spite of it, or because they had to do an autopsy. Probably the latter, but the fact that they didn't specify it is a little worrying.

Re:The dog died.

Linux killed a dog? It must have been using ReiserFS, I hear it's a killer file system.

Bad analogy

Jokes about killer file systems are like cars with missing passenger seats.

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And then they installed Linux on it.

Re:The dog died.

Did they go for yellow dog or puppy?

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The Lonestar may not be able to successfully perform surgery, but I hear it's pretty good at jamming Dark Helmet's radar.

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Yeah, it doesn't count to do computer surgery if the thing dies anyways.

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Look on the bright side: The cancer died too.

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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.

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I doubt it was a volunteer.

Re:The dog died.

It was in a EULA printed on the back of a doggy treat: 'By eating this buscuit, you agree to be bound and dissected by the terms of this agreement...'

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We can't all be as pessimistic as Anonymous Coward.

Awesome

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.

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We could get the savings now, without machines, if we lowered the bar to doing certain doctor-only actions and stopped artificially limiting the amount of doctors in the market.

In some cases, they already are by allowing doctor's assistants and nurses' ass

Re:Awesome

How very appropriate, to have your sight both destroyed and restored by the same man's products!

Re:Awesome

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.

Planning the surgery

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 planne

Autodoc?

This sounds like one of the first steps in creating an autodoc from Larry Niven's books. Basically a box (coffin) you put someone in, close the lid and wait for it to fix them. It contains full life support, can perform surgery and produce (cloning?) it's own replacement parts.

Of more immediate use, this sort of thing could be very useful for situations where surgeons are not available. Ships at sea, trips to Mars, NHS hospitals with long waiting lists...

It's not a Beowulf Cluster

Does this qualify as a Beowoof Cluster?

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Please tag "linuxkillsdogs". The dog died. If this were a Microsoft product, the dog would have lived. You open source freaks are just evil.

Free software is the right tool for the job.

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 the

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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

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I can imagine the dreams I'll have tonight:

"I exist to cut flesh...

PC LOAD LETTER...
PC LOAD LETTER!"

"Nooo!"