How Do Surgical Monitors Reduce Image Latency?

During a delicate procedure, you move your instrument, but the image on screen lags behind. This delay disrupts your focus and coordination, turning precision work into a challenge.

Surgical monitors reduce latency by using powerful, dedicated processing chips, optimized low-latency software, and high-speed signal pathways. These elements work together to minimize the time between video input and display output for real-time performance.

The delay between a surgeon’s action and its appearance on a monitor is known as latency or lag. While measured in milliseconds, this small delay can have a significant impact on surgical performance, especially in minimally invasive surgery¹. Unlike consumer televisions that prioritize cinematic effects, medical displays are engineered with a singular focus on speed and accuracy. Achieving this near-instantaneous visual feedback requires a deep understanding of what causes latency and a systematic approach to eliminating it at every stage of the signal chain. This article explores the specific technologies and design principles that allow modern surgical monitors² to deliver the real-time performance surgeons depend on.

What Causes Image Latency in Surgical Displays?

You see a sharp, clear image, but it feels disconnected from your real-time actions. This hidden delay is frustrating. Understanding its source is the first step toward solving the problem.

Image latency is caused by the monitor’s internal processing tasks. These include converting the input signal, scaling the resolution to match the panel, applying color corrections, and running noise reduction algorithms before the final image is displayed.

A monitor does more than just display a picture; it’s an active computing device. When a video signal arrives from an endoscope, it must undergo several transformations. Each of these steps takes time, contributing to the total latency³. For example, if the camera outputs a 1080p signal but the monitor has a 4K panel, a scaling algorithm must intelligently create the extra pixels. If the signal is interlaced, it must be converted to a progressive format. The monitor also performs crucial color and gamma adjustments to ensure the image is clinically accurate. While these processes are necessary for image quality, they are the primary sources of delay. A standard consumer display might add 50 to 100 milliseconds of lag, which is unacceptable for surgery. Our entry-level MS192SA HD monitor is engineered to keep these processing delays⁴ to an absolute minimum, ensuring the image on its native HD panel is both accurate and responsive.

Common Sources of Processing Latency

How Do High-Speed Signal Processing Chips Help Reduce Lag?

A monitor’s processing can be a major bottleneck, creating a frustrating delay. This sluggishness can compromise the fluid motion needed for surgery. A faster processor is the only way to clear this bottleneck.

High-speed signal processing chips, such as FPGAs or specialized SoCs, execute image calculations with massive parallelism. They are designed to handle high-bandwidth video streams with dedicated hardware, minimizing the time required for each processing step.

At the heart of every low-latency monitor is a powerful processing engine. Unlike the general-purpose processors in computers or consumer TVs, surgical monitors often use Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)⁵ or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)⁶. These chips are not designed to run a variety of apps; they are designed to do one thing exceptionally well: process video streams at incredible speeds. Their internal architecture allows multiple tasks, like scaling and color correction, to happen simultaneously rather than one after another. This parallel processing dramatically reduces the total time the signal spends inside the monitor. This is especially important for high-resolution displays. Our largest surgical monitor, the MS550P, must process over eight million pixels for every 4K frame. This requires an immensely powerful chip that can handle the massive data throughput without introducing any perceptible lag, ensuring the large-screen view remains perfectly synchronized with the surgeon’s actions.

Why Is Low Latency Crucial During Minimally Invasive Procedures?

During laparoscopy, your hands move, but the image on screen lags slightly behind. This disconnect between action and feedback can make precise movements feel clumsy and uncertain, increasing procedural risk.

Low latency is crucial because surgeons depend on the monitor for direct hand-eye coordination. Any delay breaks this intuitive link, disrupting precise movements, extending procedure time, and potentially compromising patient safety during delicate tasks.

In minimally invasive surgery⁷, the monitor is the surgeon’s window into the patient’s body. The surgeon’s brain forms a tight feedback loop between the movement of their hands and the visual confirmation they receive from the screen. When latency is high, this loop is broken. The brain sends a command to the hand, but the visual feedback arrives late. This forces the surgeon to slow down and make more deliberate, less intuitive movements, which can increase cognitive load and fatigue. The consequences can range from inefficiency to outright error. A delayed view could lead to an instrument moving too far, a suture being placed incorrectly, or a blood vessel being damaged. The difference between a 15-millisecond delay and an 80-millisecond delay can be the difference between a fluid, confident procedure and a hesitant, challenging one. For this reason, monitors like our MS247SA FHD endoscopic display are purpose-built to deliver the near-zero latency⁸ required for such precise, high-stakes work.

Can Display Refresh Rates Impact Perceived Latency?

The image on your monitor feels sluggish during fast movements. This motion blur can make it difficult to track instruments accurately, even if the processing lag is low. A higher refresh rate offers a solution.

Yes, a higher refresh rate significantly reduces motion blur and updates the image more frequently. While it does not change the internal processing delay, it shortens the time until the next frame is displayed, lowering the overall perceived latency.

Latency is composed of two main parts: the processing delay and the display update time. The refresh rate of a monitor, measured in Hertz (Hz), dictates the display update time. A standard 60Hz monitor can only show a new image every 16.67 milliseconds. A 120Hz monitor cuts that time in half, showing a new image every 8.33 milliseconds. This has a powerful effect on the perception of lag. Even if a monitor has a fixed processing delay of 10ms, a 120Hz panel can display that processed frame sooner than a 60Hz panel can. The faster refresh rate⁹ also creates much smoother motion, as the on-screen image is updated more frequently to match the real-world action. This reduction in motion blur¹⁰ makes it easier for the surgeon’s eyes to track fast-moving instruments, creating a more direct and connected experience. Our MS275P 4K monitor utilizes an advanced panel that supports higher refresh rates, directly addressing this issue to provide a clearer, more responsive surgical view.

Refresh Rate and Display Latency

How Does Reshin Optimize Its Surgical Monitors for Real-Time Performance?

You need a monitor you can trust to keep up in the OR. Generic displays make compromises, but surgical devices require uncompromising speed. We build our monitors from the ground up for real-time responsiveness.

We engineer for low latency at a system level. This involves using powerful, specialized processors, writing highly efficient firmware, and designing a direct, high-bandwidth signal path from the input connector to the display panel itself.

At Reshin, we treat latency not as a single feature but as a core principle of our entire design philosophy. Our approach is holistic. It starts with selecting processing chips that are purpose-built for real-time video¹¹, not repurposed from consumer electronics. We then write our own firmware, a lean and optimized software stack that eliminates any non-essential features that could add processing cycles and introduce delay. The physical layout of our circuit boards is meticulously planned to create the shortest and cleanest possible signal path. We minimize the number of components the signal must pass through, as each one represents a potential point of delay. This end-to-end optimization¹² is present in all our surgical models, including the MS321PC 4K Surgical Monitor. By controlling every aspect of the design, we ensure that our monitors are not just fast, but predictably and reliably fast, giving surgeons the real-time visual feedback they need to perform at their best.

Conclusion

Reducing image latency is not about one single feature. It is a result of a dedicated engineering process combining powerful processors, efficient software, and high-speed display panels to ensure real-time surgical visualization. To experience ultra-low-latency surgical monitors, contact Reshin at martin@reshinmonitors.com.