British Surgical Robots Organization is the First in the World to Test Health Data in Glass

In what is being heralded as a watershed moment in the digitization of healthcare, a British surgical robotics firm will become the first in the world to store clinical health data on glass platters.

CMR Surgical has teamed up with Microsoft to encode vast amounts of data from hundreds of surgical robotic processes onto a single glass slide measuring only 7.5cm by 7.5cm.

According to the report, storing data in glass could help to standardize 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 digitization of healthcare, the secure treatment of medical data and the increasing digitization – in many ways for the first time ever – of surgery".

Last year, four NHS hospitals successfully deployed Versius, CMR's surgical robot arm designed to do complex surgeries with improved precision, accuracy, and agility, to treat patients with serious bowel disease or bowel cancer.

Such procedures create enormous amounts of data, much of which has never been routinely available before, making it incredibly valuable for future surgeons and surgical robot systems to learn from.

Each silica glass platter is robust enough to endure being baked in an oven, boiled, microwaved, scrubbed, or demagnetized, and while it can still shatter like regular glass, if left undisturbed in data centers, it may last for tens of thousands of years.

According to a Microsoft spokesperson, the data is encoded using lasers and can be read back using machine learning algorithms to decode images and patterns formed as polarized light shines through the glass.

"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," Mr. Hares told I News.

Medical information is among the most delicate and valuable, making it a tempting target for cybercriminals. Despite the anonymity of the patient data CMR collects and analyses, protecting it from corruption, deterioration, and theft is a top issue.