RTI Connext Anywhere: the connectivity software solution for remote surgery

Monogram recently achieved a significant industry milestone by completing the fully remote, robotically-assisted Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) procedure on a cadaver leg, where surgeons in New York City controlled an orthopaedic robot located in Austin, Texas.

Monogram uses Connext Anywhere to achieve reliable and low-latency communications for telesurgery, enabling precise and time-saving procedures. 

In order to address the technical challenges of teleoperation, Monogram required a flexible software connectivity solution that was designed for distributed, secure, and reliable data flow. Connext Anywhere, based on the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard, accelerates development of intelligent and connected platforms, and provides a range of reliability features to optimise and prioritise real-time data flow over intermittent networks.

“A joint-replacement surgery is incredibly invasive, stressful and is still a largely manual process today, with 100,000 knee replacements failing each year,” said Kamran Shamaei, CTO at Monogram Orthopaedics. “We feel strongly that our total knee replacement system, with RTI’s underlying technology, will help to dramatically reduce this number, allowing patients to have a more stable, better-fitting knee replacement with fewer complications in a fraction of the time it takes today.”

The Connext Anywhere Cloud Discovery Service minimises deployment-specific configuration while improving system scalability. This allows Monogram applications to dynamically discover each other across networks and establish efficient peer-to-peer communication. Monogram is able to take advantage of RTI’s extensive set of development tools in order to visualise data sharing across large-scale distributed surgical systems. This allows system developers to better observe behaviour during test and deployment, and to more quickly identify configuration or network problems.

“For remote surgery to be feasible, the system requires high-fidelity, low-latency, and secure communication over mobile and wide area networks,” said Darren Porras, Market Development Manager, Medical at RTI. “Connext Anywhere addresses the biggest technical challenges in teleoperations today. We’re proud to be working with Monogram Orthopaedics as they break through barriers with this historic, fully remote demonstration.”