How to Reduce the Latency of Remote Medical Device Operations

Abstract

As a key application of digital precision medicine, telesurgery is highly sensitive to end-to-end latency, which affects surgical manipulation synchronization, robotic control accuracy and patient safety. High-precision minimally invasive surgery requires latency below 50 ms, yet most existing methods only optimize isolated components, resulting in excessive latency that fails clinical requirements. This study proposes a full-chain latency optimization framework integrating deterministic communication, adjacent edge computing, AI motion prediction compensation and dual-link redundant transmission. Based on a cloud-edge-device architecture, the system optimizes latency across network, computation, encoding, device control and security layers via 5G URLLC, network slicing, H.265 intelligent encoding, LSTM delay compensation, lightweight encryption and zero-trust security design.Experimental results show the system stabilizes end-to-end latency at 23–50 ms, reduces network latency from 120 ms to 3–30 ms, and drops the video freezing rate from 12.7% to 0.3%. Clinical evaluations verify its surgical performance is consistent with conventional in-hospital robotic surgery, satisfying high-precision telesurgery requirements. This solution cuts the deployment cost of dedicated communication links. Despite limitations including insufficient remote 5G coverage, high device costs and unstable cross-operator networks, future research will integrate advanced communication and digital twin technologies to further reduce latency and promote standardized large-scale clinical deployment.