British surgical robotics firm becomes first in the world to trial encoding health data in glass
3 min readA British surgical robotics company will become the first in the world to store clinical health data on glass platters in what is being hailed as a milestone in the digitisation of healthcare.
CMR Surgical has partnered with Microsoft to encode vast amounts of information from hundreds of surgical robotic procedures onto a single glass slide measuring just 7.5cm by 7.5cm – roughly the size of a coaster.
Storing data in glass could help to standardise complicated surgical procedures and improve patient outcomes in what Luke Hares, chief technology officer of CMR, called “a very important building block to the larger digitisation of healthcare, the secure treatment of medical data and the increasing digitisation – in many ways for the first time ever – of surgery”.
Two NHS hospital successfully used Versius, CMR’s surgical robot arm designed to carry out intricate surgeries with greater precision, accuracy and dexterity, to carry out colorectal surgeries last year, treating patients with serious bowel disease or bowel cancer.
Such procedures generate vast amounts of data, much of which has never before been routinely available, making it extremely valuable to train both future surgeons and surgical robot systems.
Such procedures generate vast amounts of data, much of which has never before been routinely available, making it extremely valuable to train both future surgeons and surgical robot systems.
While modern cloud systems are efficient at storing tremendous amounts of data, they are expensive and at risk of being held to ransom by hackers or the data becoming corrupted and lost, warned Mr Hares.
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“Storing data in glass means we can be confident we’re not going to lose it, and that it won’t be corrupted or changed because it’s a permanent record,” he told i.
Each silica glass platter is tough enough to withstand being baked in an oven, boiled, microwaved, scoured or demagnetised, and although it can still smash as traditional glass would, it could survive for tens of thousands of years if left undisturbed in data centres.
The data is encoded using lasers and is read back using machine learning algorithms to decode images and patterns created as polarised light shines through the glass, a Microsoft spokesperson explained.
The tech giant encoded the 1978 Warner Bros film Superman onto one of the glass sheets to demonstrate its potential as viable storage in 2019, pointing out how relatively short lifespan of hard disk drives and magnetic tape (between three and five and five to seven years, respectively) makes transferring data to new media a costly business.
Medical data is among the most sensitive and valuable information, making it an attractive target for hackers. Although the patient information CMR collects and analyses is anonymised, safeguarding it against corruption, decay and theft is a priority.
“The world is becoming more aware of identity theft and ransomware attacks, and that can’t happen with data stored in this format – it’s the ultimate backup,” Mr Hares said.
“You can’t carry out a ransomware attack on data stored in a non-volatile medium, you can’t take it away and encrypt it with only you knowing the keys. The overwhelming majority of surgeons are very happy to be presented with information that can help them to improve and to help their patient, and that’s exactly what this system does.”