Automaton
The Global Robotics Institute at the Florida Hospital has just hosted the Third Annual World Robotic Urology Symposium, which brought together 600 healthcare professionals, including world leaders in robotic surgery, from around the globe. The field of robotic surgery is slowly building followers among surgeons, who swear by its accuracy and precision. In addition, robotic surgery promises reduced costs, mostly due to shorter anesthesia, less blood loss, smaller wounds and, ultimately, shorter hospital stays. And then there's always the possibility of remote robot surgery, promising to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas - or simply allowing you to be operated by the top surgeon of your choice, without the need to fly around the globe.
This year's conference program included 10 live surgeries beamed in from around the country. The not-so-faint-hearted can follow future live internet broadcasts online - the next live robot surgery webcast is scheduled for tomorrow, March 26th, 12.00pm PST.
In spite of its youth, robotic surgery has already made itself a bad name with some patients: Germany's RoboDoc debacle has resulted in over 100 lawsuits of patients suffering muscular and nerve tissue damage after undergoing robot-assisted hip-replacement surgery. Nevertheless, Germany has just re-invested 13 Mio Euro in the orthoMIT program to develop robotic surgical strategies.
For further reading, make sure to check out a previous post on underwater robot surgery as well as the 2006 IEEE Spectrum article Doc at a distance.
Image: The Da Vinci Surgical Robot
Editor: Erico Guizzo
Contributor: Mikell Taylor
Contributor: Markus Waibel
Comments (2)
Robotic Surgery -- Reassuring or scary?
RoboDoc is scary indeed. But the Da Vinci most certainly is not. Actually, the Da Vinci is mislabeled as robotic. Its much better described as Telepresence, because it enables the surgeon to do fine, minimally invasive procedures with the ease of open surgery by giving him/her the full experience of reaching into an open surgical field with conventional surgical instruments. There are now over 700 of these systems installed worldwide, and they are allowing many more surgeries to be performed "closed", with better outcomes and quicker hospital release.
The Da Vinci can minify the instrument motions and magnify the stereographic video images while maintain the surgeon's perception that the instrument tips in the image are rigidly connected to the hand controls. This enables the surgeon to move with even greater speed and dexterity than he/she would have in open surgery. And hand tremors can be tuned out.
Posted by Phil Green | March 28, 2008 2:20 PM
My wife had robotic (Da Vinci) surgery in February. After several weeks of post-operative distress and discomfort, and a number of diagnostic procedures, we discovered she is suffering from a hole in her bladder, an unfortunate consequence of the robotic surgery. Now she has several more weeks of embarrassment and anxiety to look forward to until corrective surgery, scheduled towards the end of April. Incidentally, that operation will require the fully invasive “big slice” we had hoped to avoid with robotic surgery in the first place. So, all in all, our experience with robotic surgery was, and continues to be, quite negative.
Posted by Greg Showman | March 30, 2008 3:54 PM