Doctors operated on a 4-year-old girl thousands of miles away, according to a report. The operation was made possible via a video stream.
Complex Heart Surgery Via Video Stream
Helena, 4, also has Down syndrome and was born with a severe congenital cardiac condition. Congenital heart defects are abnormalities that can damage a baby's heart's structure and function and are present at birth.
Her hometown of São Luís, Maranhão, did not offer the required operation. The procedure is only available in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, on the opposite side of the country from Helena's residence.
When the girl was two, her parents learned she needed to undergo complex surgery. However, the family could not travel to So Paulo due to the hefty cost.
According to Brazilian news channel TV Globo, Helena's family received an offer this year to take part in an innovative experiment that attempts to make complex heart treatments accessible in areas where they were previously unavailable, Newsweek reported.
The University Hospital of São Luís and the Instituto do Coração (InCor) in São Paulo have joined forces on the project. Fifteen kids from the state of Maranhão have taken part in the project thus far.
On May 4, Helena underwent surgery at the University Hospital in São Luís as part of the experiment with a group of real-world medical professionals present. But a group of specialists at InCor in São Paulo remotely observed the entire process in real-time via a video link. They watched and directed the whole process from around 1,500 miles.
A high-resolution camera was installed in the operating room and sent everything in real-time to the monitoring center in São Paulo over a 5G link to enable remote operation. To provide a first-person perspective, surgeons also wore headcams.
Sensitive microphones were additionally positioned all over the space to record audio and voice. The team's medical equipment was also internet-connected, allowing the InCor team to view real-time data.
The InCor team spoke with the surgeons in São Luís during the three-hour procedure, walking them through each stage.
The procedure was successful in the end, and Helena spent around ten days recovering in the hospital before she was discharged.
Lifesaving Surgery Done by 2 Doctors Apart
It wasn't the first case when a complex surgery was carried out by doctors thousands of miles apart. In a previous report from Science Times, US-based surgeon Jim Porter, a medical doctor for robotic surgery at the Swedish Medical Center in Settle, worked with urologist Archie Fernando in operating Mo Tajer, 31, who needed surgery after his testicular cancer metastasized to his abdomen.
Porter guided Fernando as the latter operated a surgical robot to do the five-hour operation. They talked with Porter using an augment-reality pointer to identify body partners.
The operation was made possible using Nadine Hacha-Haram's Proximie, a platform that offers care beyond limits by bringing experts together no matter where they are. They opted to use Proximie because it happened during the pandemic's peak, and they didn't want to expose the already immunosuppressed patient for that long in the hospital.
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