Paradigms and experimental set-up for the determination of the acceptable delay in telesurgery.

The aim of this work was to develop an experimental set-up and realistic paradigms to study the effect of delay on video flux transmission and surgical performance. Four exercises were performed by 15 surgeons with 5 different simulated transmission delays. Large standard deviation of the duration of an exercise was found. Even with a short transmission delay of 150ms, some surgeon found that the surgical procedure was not possible. Further work has to be done to have a better evaluation of the surgical precision.