Someone asked me to draw Jahir in scrubs and I thought 'great! I'll draw a scene of him in surgery!' And that made me realize... I have no idea what a surgical theater looks like despite writing about all the technology for decades. So. I did a diagram. And wrote this for the wiki!
While traditional modalities of surgery are used in the Alliance, the most advanced surgical platform available is the medimage, which uses a variety of technologies (including the breakthrough that made Pads possible) to continuously scan the interior of the body, build a solidigraphic image of it for gross manipulation by surgeons, and then duplicates their motions, in miniature, inside the body. This solves several problems: it allows far more precision in technique, since surgeons no longer have to work directly on a body part; it minimizes invasiveness and injury, while results in patients recovering faster; it allows multiple surgeons to work on the patient without crowding; and it reduces surgeon fatigue, since it allows them to use more of their bodies, in a more natural way, while working.
A surgical theater outfitted to use this technology is a significant piece of technology, consisting of a lower platform (the bed and its emitter); an upper platform, usually mounted in the ceiling (the upper emitter); and side installations for monitoring and power. A minimal medimage platform will allow a third of the body to be addressed at one time, but these small installations are rarer than full body platforms.
The minimal (typical) team for a medimage surgery consists of an anesthesiologist, who monitors the patient’s status at the patient’s head where the displays are mounted. The anesthesiologist is in charge not just of the drugs used during the surgery, but the use of the paralysis field (which is generated by three bands, one at the head, one under the medimage arch, and one at the ankles). The engineer tracks the equipment power and status, and oversees the backup generators; the engineer also addresses any technical issues that might arise during the use of the platform. Larger hospitals assign banks of engineers to their surgical wards, who sit outside the operating theater; smaller locations might seat their engineers inside the theater, depending on their design and procedural preferences.
The minimal surgical team is one principal surgeon and one surgical healer-assist, but some operations may call for more participants. A medimage surgery can be undertaken with a single surgeon but this is not encouraged except in emergencies.
While the Pad technology made the medimage platform possible, there are significant practical differences between them. Pads can operate with only a base station; medimage requires both the base and head stations to generate and maintain their field. Because the surgical platform must remain in operation and stable for continuous periods, its power needs are far greater. Pads have a limited number of functions, all of which can be performed by its single base; the medimage platform is actually a constellation of functions, undertaken by separate modules, all of which must be functioning in order for it to work.
There are multiple failsafes programmed into a medimage platform to reduce the frequency of errors, the most notable being that the manipulative element will be locked out if any of the other technologies fail (power, visual/monitoring, drug delivery, etc). Medical professionals call this the ‘all but, no cut’ principle, based on the frequently repeated line that if ‘all but one thing is operating, you still can’t operate’ made popular in the Tam-leyan hospital that pioneered the technology.
