Artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant promise for enhancing intraoperative perception and decision-making in telesurgery, where physical separation impairs sensory feedback and control. Despite advances in medical AI and surgical robotics, conventional electronic AI architectures remain fundamentally constrained by the compounded latency from serial processing of inference and communication. This limitation is especially critical in latency-sensitive procedures such as endovascular interventions, where delays over 200 ms can compromise real-time AI reliability and patient safety. Here, we introduce an Optical Computation-in-Communication (OCiC) framework that reduces end-to-end latency significantly by performing AI inference concurrently with optical communication. OCiC integrates Optical Remote Computing Units (ORCUs) directly into the optical communication pathway, with each ORCU experimentally achieving up to 69 tera-operations per second per channel through spectrally efficient two-dimensional photonic convolution. The system maintains ultrahigh inference fidelity within 0.1% of CPU/GPU baselines on classification and coronary angiography segmentation, while intrinsically mitigating cumulative error propagation, a longstanding barrier to deep optical network scalability. We validated the robustness of OCiC through outdoor dark fibre deployments, confirming consistent and stable performance across varying environmental conditions. When scaled globally, OCiC transforms long-haul fibre infrastructure into a distributed photonic AI fabric with exascale potential, enabling reliable, low-latency telesurgery across distances up to 10,000 km and opening a new optical frontier for distributed medical intelligence.

Robotic teleoperation over long communication distances poses challenges due to delays in commands and feedback from network latency. One simple yet effective strategy to reduce errors and increase performance under delay is to downscale the relative motion between the operating surgeon and the robot. The question remains as to what is the optimal scaling factor, and how this value changes depending on the level of latency as well as operator tendencies. We present user studies investigating the relationship between latency, scaling factor, and performance. The results of our studies demonstrate a statistically significant difference in performance between users and across scaling factors for certain levels of delay. These findings indicate that the optimal scaling factor for a given level of delay is specific to each user, motivating the need for personalized models for optimal performance. We present techniques to model the user-specific mapping of latency level to scaling factor for optimal performance, leading to an efficient and effective solution to optimizing performance of robotic teleoperation and specifically telesurgery under large communication delay.

Telesurgery is an effective way to deliver service from expert surgeons to areas without immediate access to specialized resources. However, many of these areas, such as rural districts or battlefields, might be subject to different problems in communication, especially latency and intermittent periods of communication outage. This challenge motivates the use of a digital twin for the surgical system, where a simulation would mirror the robot hardware and surgical environment in the real world. The surgeon would then be able to interact with the digital twin during communication outage, followed by a recovery strategy on the real robot upon reestablishing communication. This paper builds the digital twin for the da Vinci surgical robot, with a buffering and replay strategy that reduces the mean task completion time by 23% when compared to the baseline, for a peg transfer task subject to intermittent communication outage.

The pace of change in telecommunications is increasing every year. A case in point is the rapid research and development of 6G technologies when 5G has not even been fully implemented across Australia. But UNSW expert, Dr. Shaghik Atakaramians, says progress is vital as people and businesses become ever more dependent on fast and reliable transfer of data. "In the next 10 years, we can expect massive changes and new technologies coming into our lives which will require more and more connectivity at higher speeds as we transfer more and more data," says the Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications. "We can imagine completely autonomous systems; or multi-sensory extended reality which integrates the five traditional human senses with the digital world; or real-time remote telesurgery; or complete virtual shopping malls. "These sound like something out of science fiction, but they are potentially possible with 6G technology whereas they could not be feasible using current 5G standards.

For more than 30 years, robotics has employed in the healthcare business. These robots range from laboratory robots that deal with medications to surgical robots that do surgeries or procedures on their own to robots that care for patients after surgery. Robots can help humans stay healthy for a long time without the use of medication or hospitalisation. Intel, for example, provides new technologies for the creation of health robots such as surgical robots, modular robots, service robots, mobile robots, and autonomous robots, allowing it to expand its reach in a variety of health-related fields. AI-driven robotic surgery is a mechanical device that allows doctors to focus on the difficult components of surgery by assisting with surgical tool handling and positioning during procedures. Their usage reduces surgeons' instabilities during surgery and assists them in improving their abilities and performing better during interventions, resulting in improved patient outcomes and lower overall healthcare costs.

As technology advances, more and more industries are able to benefit from it. Among those industries is health care, particularly the surgery department. As a branch of medicine that's highly dependent on a surgical team's skills and experience, surgery also relies heavily on innovations and new technologies that can help improve efficiency and safety. Suppose you're part of the team that performs surgical operations. In that case, it's worth knowing some of the latest trends and innovations that can make your work more efficient, more promising, and somewhat less tedious than it currently is.

Dr. Sam Browd is a Seattle neurosurgeon who is taking telemedicine and virtual reality technology to a different, unexpected place – the operating room. Browd is professor of neurological surgery at the University of Washington, an attending neurosurgeon at Seattle Children's Hospital, and cofounder and chief medical officer at health IT vendor Proprio. He has spent the last few years working with engineers and other surgeons to bring the operating room out of the analog world and into the digital. What they've created is a new technology that provides surgeons a 360-view of surgery by combining virtual reality and artificial intelligence, enabling surgeons to integrate information in new ways. Out of this, too, comes work on telesurgery – the ability to do live surgery in different locations or mentorship and proctorship.

The introduction of surgical robots brought about advancements in surgical procedures. The applications of remote telesurgery range from building medical clinics in underprivileged areas, to placing robots abroad in military hot-spots where accessibility and diversity of medical experience may be limited. Poor wireless connectivity may result in a prolonged delay, referred to as latency, between a surgeon's input and action a robot takes. In surgery, any micro-delay can injure a patient severely and in some cases, result in fatality. One was to increase safety is to mitigate the effects of latency using deep learning aided computer vision. While the current surgical robots use calibrated sensors to measure the position of the arms and tools, in this work we present a purely optical approach that provides a measurement of the tool position in relation to the patient's tissues. This research aimed to produce a neural network that allowed a robot to detect its own mechanical manipulator arms. A conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN) was trained on 1107 frames of mock gastrointestinal robotic surgery data from the 2015 EndoVis Instrument Challenge and corresponding hand-drawn labels for each frame. When run on new testing data, the network generated near-perfect labels of the input images which were visually consistent with the hand-drawn labels and was able to do this in 299 milliseconds. These accurately generated labels can then be used as simplified identifiers for the robot to track its own controlled tools. These results show potential for conditional GANs as a reaction mechanism such that the robot can detect when its arms move outside the operating area within a patient. This system allows for more accurate monitoring of the position of surgical instruments in relation to the patient's tissue, increasing safety measures that are integral to successful telesurgery systems.

A Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare expert panel has given the green light to remotely-controlled surgery using medical robots, opening the way for patients to get operations by highly-skilled doctors far away. The panel approved a draft amendment to the guidelines for online medical treatment on June 28 lifting the ban on robotic telesurgery. In response, medical societies concerned will set guidelines on detailed prerequisites for the operations, aiming for practical implementation within the coming years. Under the scheme, telesurgeries will be performed using the U.S.-made da Vinci Surgical System. The system has multiple arms equipped with endoscopes, scalpels, and other surgical necessities, and will even stitch up incisions.

Like all everyday miracles of technology, the longer you watch a robot perform surgery on a human being, the more it begins to look like an inevitable natural wonder. Earlier this month I was in an operating theatre at University College Hospital in central London watching a 59-year-old man from Potters Bar having his cancerous prostate gland removed by the four dexterous metal arms of an American-made machine, in what is likely a glimpse of the future of most surgical procedures. The robot was being controlled by Greg Shaw, a consultant urologist and surgeon sitting in the far corner of the room with his head under the black hood of a 3D monitor, like a Victorian wedding photographer. Shaw was directing the arms of the remote surgical tool with a fluid mixture of joystick control and foot-pedal pressure and amplified instruction to his theatre team standing at the patient's side. The surgeon, 43, has performed a thousand of such procedures, which are particularly useful for pelvic operations; those, he says, in which you are otherwise "looking down a deep, dark hole with a flashlight".