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Robots Approved For Cardiac Surgery
An anonymous reader writes "CNN has an article up on
a new robotic heart-surgery system. By making 4 relatively small incisions into the
patients chest the da Vinci
Surgical System, guided by real surgeons, uses its pencil sized "tools" to conduct
several different heart procedures including closed-chest coronary bypass surgery. By
operating on a patient with their chest closed, patient recovery times have reduced
from weeks to just days. Despite the robotic surgery taking longer than traditional
operations, this reduced recovery times makes the robotic surgery cost less
overall than traditional open heart surgery. Fortunately, if anything goes
wrong with the robot, the human surgeons can jump right in and pick up where the robot
has stopped. Already the robot (in place in over 130 hospitals world wide) has been
FDA approved
for Mitral Valve repair surgery. More insightful info on the da Vinci System here."
It's not the first such system, either.
That sounds... scary But, I guess it's ok.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
Until it's hacked by Chinese!!!
I still wouldn't want a machine operating on me..
Or is this a human surgeon performing surgery with a very sophisticated set of tools? I know the word 'robot' makes for good headlines. Does an RC Car qualify as a robot? It does in "Robot Wars".
I can imagine counting slowly backwards from 10 and just before I doze off hearing: "I'm sorry dave, I'm afraid I cannot do that."
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast.
*insert obligatory "It better be running Linux instead of Windows" joke, pointing out that it might crash and kill someone if it's running Windows*
i'll bet many people think that the bugs that are in this thing (and there are always bugs on anything this complicated) make for a somewhat scary prospecte to go under the knife held by said machine. but think about it, how many times have you screwed up a math problem? now how many times has you TI83? i'll take a robot's steady hand to a live doctor any day.
Isn't this the same robot that was just involved in a patient death?
I mention it because I caught the news about a robot being involved in a surgery accident on the newswire a couple days ago, and then yesterday I caught a puff piece on the DaVinci system on the TV news (ABC, I think?) - no mention of that recent fatality.
No mention of the fatality in the CNN article, either. And for that matter, no mention of it here. I find this very strange. Slashdot editors missing it, I can understand. But wouldn't even the most brain-dead journalist make this connection? Let alone the big-leaguers?
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Fortunately, if anything goes wrong with the robot, the human surgeons can jump right in and pick up where the robot has stopped.
unless it has stopped after impaling itself thru your heart i guess..
I don't mind having a surgeon drive, but totally automated makes me a bit nervous.
Doctor: BOT 3826, cauterize the primary right aortic valve.
;)
Bot: *pause* I'm sorry. I can't do that.
Technology... oy.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
But who will the overly litigious American peoples sue if something goes wrong? The doctor, who is, for all intents and purposes, not there? At any rate, while I am clearly attempting to facetious (sp?), this is really a very big step forward. I just don't want it working on me until they've worked out the bugs.
Doc
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
I had a teacher who enjoyed explaining, in gory detail, how they sawed his sternum in two, pried open his rib cage,, fixed his heart problem, and then stapled his sternum back together. This new technique sounds much less painful.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Guess they still don't trust these little buggers to operate by themselves, eh? When do we get independently acting robots?
definition of Robotic according to dictionary.com
A lot of times when doctors go to operate on someone with heart problems, they discover other defects or abnormalities with the heart and surrounding vessels. Will a robotic system that is minimally invasive create "tunnel vision" so that doctors are unable to see other potential problems?
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
By making 4 relatively small incisions into the patients chest
...
Fortunately, if anything goes wrong with the robot, the human surgeons can jump right in
I think they're going to need bigger incisions...
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
...a good Microsoft BSOD joke. Don't you agree?
The manufacturer is Intuitive Surgical
Here is a story about a man that this surgery recently killed.
I'm glad I don't need this type of surgery.
This while sounding scary at first, is probably a step in the right direction for surgical medicine.
I however, would not like to be one of the beta testers for this thing!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
...or else we will have a new generation of assassins who hack in the hospital network and just accidentally puncture your heart. I mean really, this is a bit scary - especially because based on my experience many doctors do not exactly know what is happening on their computer and how to keep it secure - and to make sure no-one plugs any device on their network or any software on their computer during the visit....and even if the computer is not networked, do you really think it would be impossible for someone to slip in a device providing wireless access to that machine. Has anyone noticed any articles on these issues?
Robots don't have hearts, unless the Wizard gives them one, and if you know a wizard, hey, who needs surgery?
Best Windows Freeware
"...it better not have any software."
When it comes to something that needs to be that robust, I want a control system consisting of highly reliable real-time (not pseudo-realtime like embedded distros) microcontrollers.
I want parts designed to last 20 years, not something that could fail in one due to a motherboard failure, or at any time due to a hard drive failure. Software just doesn't cut it here.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Robotic surgery really gives a new meaning to the blue screen of death eh? Grab the paddles, we gotta restart!
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. -- Blaise Pascal
Anyone else find this random quotes appearing at the bottom of stories today ironic? I haven't looked at Slash, but it looks like two quotes are randomized daily maybe?
-- jimmycarter
what a country! the ROBOTS fix the HUMANS!
Now it will be
"the robot left a servo in the patients chest, DOH!"
Please moderators... try to exercise at least a tiny amount of judgement. He skips reading the article, which answered his stupid question in the 3rd paragraph, and asks it here, and it's "Insightful"?
Quick, turn off your computer before your drool shorts out your keyboard and gives you a nasty shock.
Does it also grope nurses' buts and listen to Chopin (or is that Choppin' ?) while performing surgery?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Here is a link to CSTAR, which is a national centre in Canada for robotic surgery. The page talks about a few of the systems mentionned in the article.
They seem to have quite a few robotic surgery firsts. Pretty neat stuff.
>> He skips reading the article, which answered his stupid question in the 3rd paragraph, and asks it here, and it's "Insightful"?
What makes you think the moderators read the articles either?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
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As long as it is open source, I'll let it operate on me. After all what are the benefits: stabiltiy, reliability, quality. Of course, that's assuming some wierds doesn't re-write do go killer in the middle of surgery, but anyway...
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
This bodes well for our men in uniform, who don't have the sterile environment and the number of skilled doctors available in a hospital. As one who has worked on 3D visualization projects for Army Surgeons, tele-medicine and robotic surgery are major concerns. Army medics are incredible people who put their lives on the line and their backs to the bullets to save other people ... but they don't have the necessary skills.
/.ers are sitting behind our computers screens (assumedly) close to a medical center, our men in uniform don't have the luxury. This can provide solutions to save lives, where previously they would only be put on a morphine drip to ease their last moments.
This is definitely only the beginning, while most of us
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
Robot Insurance? Yep, it's not a laughing matter for some people.
For when the metal ones come for you...
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
We don't know anything about the trial - so let's not guess about rates. I'm just saying it's very bad when such an accident (occurring just a few weeks ago) is not worthy of mention in a long news article or TV program covering the device. Especially when it clearly appears to be the result of procedural error - this isn't someone's hand slipping. It should (rightly) draw new attention to the doctor, the device, and the underlying techniques, so it's very spooky when the news covers the device without ever mentioning it's just been involved in a patient death under questionable circumstances.
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In reading the article, it would seem that the culpable party was the surgeon, not the machine.
Really? Point out where the article draws that conclusion.
As I just said elsewhere, it's unclear how the accident happened, obviously, but with something like this I consider both the underlying technique as well as the user interface potential risk factors. Of course, it could just have been human error, but that's the whole point of risk factor analysis; the line between "human error" and a false expectation or a design problem does not actually exist.
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What concerns me is that this technique requires twice the time under anaesthesia, and presumably twice as much time with the heart bypassed. I read an article recently in the Dallas Morning News about research into changes in personality in bypass surgery survivors, and how this might be caused by impurities introduced via the bypass pump, resulting in some brain damage. Case in point: my father, whose entire outlook on life changed after his bypass surgery. He went from a very optimistic person to one who is frequently pessimistic and bitter.
TANSTAAFL
It sounds great to me. Less recovery time, less trauma, more precision, etc. It probably won't be long till it's faster. Similar systems will probably start to provide all sorts of services. Eventually, you might begin to carry such things on capital ships and cruise liners, have "emergency stations" at rest stops that can repair heart attack damage instantly, etc.
Just like Star Trek. Which brings me to my concern. I can't really envision Dr. McCoy jumping in there. Once such systems are commonplace, will the doctor eventually become a mere medical technician? In 50 years, will the guy watching the surgery know what to do when MS Surgery blue screens?
Not that the percentages might be better, humans make mistakes too, but I'd hate to see the profession suffer. If nothing else, it will decrease the demand and even the perceived need for highly skilled surgeons (well into the future, of course). This could cause a shortage in which it really is just a sys-admin watching Dr. Roboto tinker with your innards, ignorant of what the hell is going on.
Of all manufacturers of these devices : Please don't try to divide by zero. I like my life.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Makes me wish that I had treated my toaster better...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
There was a recent article in the JAMA which reported that there was a decrease in cognitive ability in people how had major cardiac surgery.
They thought it might be due to the time spent on the heart-bypass machine or that time spent with the body cooled might be affect the brain in some unknown way yet. Thuse when reading this article and it stating that the surgery takes much longer but the hospital stays are shorter might in fact be hiding the fact that the rate of cognitive damage might go up and not be detected until months afterwards.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
My TI83 fucked problems up all the time.
Good thing my trusty TI89 and HP49g are there for me.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Fortunately, if anything goes wrong with the robot, the human surgeons can jump right in and pick up where the robot has stopped.
Yeah... assuming the doctors notice that anything is wrong. As pointed out in the Risks Digest recently, a surgeon-controlled robotic surgery in Tampa went terribly wrong in October; while attempting to remove a patient's cancerous kidney, the surgeon (or robot - the root cause hasn't been identified) cut the patient's aorta, an accident which went unnoticed until an hour and a half later! The man died two days later from complications related to the surgery; no mention of whether the complications are a result of the accident. But if they were, would the hospital or doctor admit it?
--Jim
Its great that they can do heart surgery with robots but consider for a second what if ther e is a black out the back up generators don't kick in or run out of gas or any kind of malfunction for that matter....on the other hand at least the robot doesn't need Malpractice Insurance. I'd prefer that my heart be handled by a well trained doctor, atleast if something goes wrong I have some one to sue.
The article mentions a group of patients who underwent atrial septal defect repair had ~3 day recovery hospital stays vs. 7-10 days for conventional surgery of this type.
My wife underwent conventional surgery for the same thing (they sew up the hole between the two atria) in fall of 2001: checked in the hospital Tuesday afternoon, rolled in to surgery Wednesday morning, was walking around Thursday afternoon, and I drove her home Friday evening. The surgeon earlier told us she'd be hospitalized only 2-3 days afterwards.
I wonder where they got the 7-10 day figure - sure doesn't match our experience. My market-speak detector is going off...
My wife lost her father a couple of years ago.
He had a triple bypass, and was up and around his room the next day. We were like "way to go dad!".
The day after that he had a fever. Within a week he was in a coma, and 2 1/2 months after the operation he was gone. It was horrible. And all because he caught a Staf infection.
It could be that maybe a surgical implement wasn't as clean as it sould be... more than likely, he just caught it from bacteria floating around in the air. He was on the table for more than a few hours.
I hope to god that advances like this can keep someone else from going through the hell that he (and we) went through. The way I see it, the less invasive the procedue it, the less likely it is that an infection will occur.
Huh?
John Connor talking to Dr. T-800 about his surgical procedure being performed by the T-1000. John: I need a moment here. You're telling me that this thing can operate on anything it touches?!
T-800: Anything it samples by physical contact.
John: Get real! Like it can -excise- a...pack of cigarettes?
T-800: No, only an object of equal size.
John: Well, why doesn't it become a -bong- or something to -subdue- me?
T-800: It can't form complex machines. Guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts. It doesn't work that way. But it can form solid metal shapes.
John: Like what?
T-800: Knives and -surgical- stabbing weapons.
Duh-duh duh duh-duh...duh-duh duh duh-duh...
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
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yeah, this is really cool. Now I would like to see doctors and scientists work to reduce time to recovery from the anesthesia---that would reduce the hospital stay time even more.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these? Would you have the surgery finish faster on one patient, or would you operate on multiple patients at once?
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
The article said that doctors can talk over should something go wrong. I'm thinking that would cover things like you described
Now if the Tin Man wants to heart, he can install a real one himself!
We have one of these at my hospital (U of Iowa). They're beyond badass. They're also FDA approved for reversal of vasectomies in addition to cardiac surgery.
:) Good to know we've got our priorities straight.
Now I'll give you three bucks to guess which approval came first.
BTW: Saw a post earlier asking why DaVinci was different than anything else. A: It has true stereoscopic vision coming from a single inserted optical laparoscope, and the hands follow NATURAL hand movement.
Actually there are plenty out there, with an amazing success record. One such, the RoboDoc, does total hip replacement operations (I'm from the Johns Hopkins University, the designer of the robot is a prof. here) and I think the robodoc has managed to reduce a 10-15% failure rate of human-conducted operations to a perfect record of zero failures! An amazing record.
I'm not sure if its FDA aproved yet, but they had like 12000 operations with it, and unless they were all conducted in Europe, where legislation does not prohibit these, they must have an FDA aproval. When it comes to precision-savvy operations I would personally go for the robot, thats for sure.
I am still waiting for my own holographic doctor.
The problem with your idea that eventually doctors will become technicians is kinda bogus. In essence, it's radio controlled, so you need a qualified surgeon to do it. And if they eventually got AI to take over, even then the doctor would have to know enough to perform the surgury on his own. Medical science has always been pretty deep and tries to make sure it covers all bases so that something like that wouldn't happen. I imagine that where there might be a technician standing by the robo surgeon if there was AI, there would still be a certified doctor nearbye just in case. Ahw, what the hell. By the time that happens heart surgury will probably be outdated: replaced by giving people new hearts grown with stem cells!
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Yes, it's quite possible that smaller incisions and a greater separation between the patient and the surgeons / nurses would reduce the chance of post-op infections, not just Staph, but of all kinds.
A slightly different problem occurrs to me, though:
In the UK recently in the light of nvCJD there've been moves to make surgical implements which are used in high-risk procedures (in this case those on lymphatic tissues) strictly single use. Even including things like cauterising irons. It seems likely that this is going to be an increasing trend as we get progressively more paranoid about this kind of thing... so, how much of this robot is disposable? What does that do to the cost-balance and to the quality of the parts being used (in the case of the cauterising irons the rule has been repealed as cheaply imported 'disposable' irons were killing patients)?
I assume all the parts that actually go inside the patients are fully sterilisable at the very least, but this does add extra wear to the parts and increase the risk of a mechanical failure...
Today teams, you're going to have to build an artery clearing, laser cutting, heart pumping cardiac surgery robot!!!
..... go !!!!
Each team will do three surgeries tomorrow in a head to head competition. The team who spills the least amount of blood and has the most living patients at the end, wins!!!
Okay teams, you have 10 hours to complete your robots. Get ready, set
In this story we hear about a surgury that went tragically wrong. A patient died when his aorta and another blood vessel supplying the kidney were accidentally cut. No one noticed for about 90 minutes.
Let's remember that Staph bacteria are normally present in the nasal passages of most people. Even well-kept hospitals are common sources of infection. That's the best reason for sending people home sooner.
I should know this kind of thing already, given the exposure I've had to the medical field, but how much blood is in a "unit"? Saying "12 units" doesn't communicate anything to a non-medical guy like me.
Actually, on further thought, it communicates a very wrong thing to me -- I'm a Type I diabetic, and to me "one unit" [of insulin] is 0.01 cc, or 0.01 ml. So "12 units of blood" sounds like something I would lose out of, say, a scraped knee. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"In an surgical operation to remove a cancerous kidney at St. Joseph's Hospital in St Petersburg, a three-armed da Vinci robot (made by Intuitive Surgical Inc.) was being controlled by an experienced doctor from a 3-dimensional computer screen, 10 feet away. The robot technology for cutting blood vessels is supposed to decrease bleeding, pain, and recovery time. Unfortunately, the patient's aorta and another blood vessel were cut, and this went unnoticed for an hour and one-half. Two days later, the patient died of complications. The developer found no mechanical problems, and absolved the robot, which had been used successfully in 10 similar operations."
Are you thinking of staph or strep? Streptococci are routinely present in the throats of healthy individuals. Some strains of staph are skin commensals, that is to say they live on the skin without causing any problems under normal conditions. Staph are a common sauce of post-operative infections, and are the culprit in MRSA, or Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, the antibiotic resistant hospital 'superbug' now seen throughout the world. They are frequently carried into hospitals by patients and visitors.
In no way is this a "robot" it is a motion transference device. It reproduces your motions with multipliers applied to them (either greater than or less than 1 multiplier) for increasing or decrease the distance traveled of the instrument. It is progress when compared to plain laparoscopy because you are no longer as limited to the angles and degree of freedom.
Now there will be one less reason to go to school and become educated. We might as well make robots do all our complex tasks, that way we can all live in ignorant bliss.
You're nothing; like me.
Hmm, how do you think they will have to do those heart transplants? :)
I'm sure Leonardo would have been happy to see his family name trademarked... Well, there's a difference... this company spells it with a lower case 'd'... Thank goodness we got innovative marketing people nowadays!
Sounds like a plot for a halloween episode of Futurama with "Dr. Bender, Heart Surgeon" :)
'Tin Man' Heart Surgeon
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Surely with the organ shortage, human recipient should come first!
I just attended a conference on this at Columbia University this summer. It's a nice idea, but it still has a long way to go. Right now, there are 3 big problems with the system: 1) As stated before here, surgeries take longer = more time under anaesthesia, less times docs and OR staff and hospital resources have for other cases 2) COST! These robots are NOT cheap, and their operating expenses are huge. Combine that with the training time for docs to get used to the system, and you have one really expensive bot. 3) In *most* cases, these bots aren't doing surgeries that can't already be done laproscopically by a good surgeon. This makes point 2 all the more problematic, obviously. The promise of telemedicine with one of these bots hasn't really been done much either - most of the time the doc is sitting down right next to the patient at the "terminal"... One can only dream of the risk that would be introduced when you put a WAN link between the terminal and the robot, no matter how fast/low latency it is. So it's a neat idea right now, but only for experimental purposes. My big problem with the conference and with techniques like this is that it's a waste of $$$ when there's so much "low hanging fruit" when it comes to Computing + Medicine. *Why is it* that docs are still WRITING perscriptions on paper pads, which can be forged, lost, etc, and can't be cross referenced automatically with other 'scrips that other physicians have perscribed for the same patient? Why is it that countless millions are wasted every year in filing paper forms, in transcribing records because insurance/docs/hospitals information systems are incompatible? How come every doc doesn't have charts/xrays/etc at any desktop/laptop/tabletpc they want in a hospital or in their own practice? How come docs don't have entire formularies of drugs at the tip of their fingers at all times? The tech for all this stuff has been around for years, but where is it? Come on! My $0.02 ($0.03 CDN)
such systems are commonplace, will the doctor eventually become a mere medical technician?
McCoy was a bad example. Take the holographic doctor from Voyager. His role was to diagnose patients and reccommend treatment. If something went wrong with his instruments, Torres or Kim were brought in to fix it.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The problem ends up being more of an economic one than a technical one, and could be very serious. I'm not talking about doctors becoming obsolete, I'm talking about a breakdown in market forces that intices peopel to the profession.
My original posting was done at work, so was limited, but to expand on the idea, it goes like this. Robotic/machine/semi-automated surgery becomes commonplace (and I'm talking many decades here). Because of this, demand for a fully trained doctor decreases. People can use computer programs and home diagnostic equipment, standard operations are now mostly automated, with many procedures not even requiring an atending physician (those where an error or complication would not introduce greater risk and need not be dealt with immediately).
This wouldn't mean that we wouldn't still need doctors, it would mean that doctors don't get paid as much. Insurance is already through the roof and many doctors routinely refuse to deliver babies or perform certain procedures where the likely hood of a suit is much greater. If machines speed up procedures, then even with greater reliability, the overall incidence of complication (especially since many complications are due to patient factors) might not decrease, and the net effect would be a wash (I'm assuming the doctor population goes down).
Why does the doctor population go down? Because insurance costs and costs of doing business are unlikely to decrease (indeed, with all this equipment, they'll likely increase), while pay, respect, and power decrease.
Certain types of doctors will still be in high demand, but, I'm saying that there are certain scernarios where the overall number of doctors decreases to problematic levels.
You wrote:
"Not that the percentages might be better, humans make mistakes too, but I'd hate to see the profession suffer. "
I guess you are not objectively aware of the situation regarding MDs in the western democracies, but they basically are in charge of controlling the supply of their own competiton. What a friggin' scam! Imagine if plumbers were able to restrict the number of incoming plumbers to the degree to which MDs already do. Well, I suppose it would take 2 weeks to see a plumber, just like it does to see a doctor or dentist.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
So I'll be brief.
1) No mechanical fault != no fault. I'm amazed I have to point out this distinction so often.
2) "There are new failure modes possible." Exactly. See? I think you already understand.
3) "I'll accept 10 robot-related deaths per year in exchange for the prevention of 100 lethal post-op infections due to poor wound healing." You just made those numbers up. Wouldn't it be nice if that were true? That's what the trial is meant to establish.
4) I have no criticism for the robot or its designers. Any judgement (positive or negative) would be premature. My point is about the news media, which has sloppily or mysteriously (probably the former) failed to mention some relevant facts when reporting in-depth about the device - like a very recent fatality under provocative circumstances.
Do you think surgeons perfoming that kind of operation (removing a cancerous kidney) routinely sever the aorta and then fail to notice for 90 minutes? This sort of info is just the sort of thing that rounds off a well-written story on a new technique.
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I wish this kind of tool would have been mainstream 3 years ago when I had an emergency aortic valve replacement. I wouldn't have to live with a 30+ centimeters scar on the chest (I was 18. I'll probably live more time in my life with my mechanical valve than I lived without it), and pain wouldn't have been that much of a big deal. But I guess I'm already getting used to it. It's just that my chest was not perfectly closed back, so I have a kind of small bump near the bottom of my sternum. I guess with this "robot", I wouldn't have this.
This is not a robot, it's teleoperation. "Robot" generally refers to a mechanical device that carries out complex functions on its own, without human guidance. Teleoperation seems like a really good idea for surgery, but robotic surgery would be premature given the state of the art.
I've heard the Boston Central Artery (aka Big Dig) compared to a heart surgery performed on a marathon runner while he is running marathon. I wonder if the robot could be used in the Dig, too. 8-)
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
Think about the computer systems that control fly-by-wire planes in flight, the space shuttles, or nuclear weapon control systems.
da Vinci Surgical System "Now making incision, and opening chest cavity. Left lung appears that of a 30 year old man, right lung resembles butterfly..."
I'm surprised noone has commented on the leaked source code for this robot.
// relocate patient // start CPR (rewrite as Patient.Chest.Push when Chest class is done) // remember to move this to Stretcher class!
It's obviously early in development, but I can't say I like the look of it.
I mean, just take a look at the error handling:
if ( BackupSurgeon.Floor() != this.GetFloor() ){
GotoStairs();
if (this.GetType == SHOVER) Patient.Push();
elseif (this.GetType == PUSHER) Patient.Shove();
}
No sig to see here. Move along.
The holographic doctor still couldn't replace real doctors. In the early days, he was stuck in sickbay. Even after he could make "house calls" there were malfunctions, and Kes or Tom had to fill in.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Please. That article has the usual mainstream fluff level of detail for technical reporting. Do you really trust them to use the phrase "totally robotic operation" and manage to mean anything worthwhile by it? If -you- were to read the technical articles, you'd find that the Da Vinci system is a "computerized telemicromanipulator", which is "also known as the surgical robot" for no apparent reason other than to confuse the media. IOW it's a pair of miniature robotic arms operated via exoskeletal controls and a stereo headset display that effectively magnifies the patient's heart from the surgeon's perspective, and enables keyhole incision heart surgery. References to the surgical team being able to 'take over' if the machine fails refer simply to falling back on traditional, chest-splitting methods of access. So, it was a good question. It -is- a human surgeon performing surgery with a very sophisticated set of tools, albeit one that will probably evolve helpful autonomous functions as the basic design is developed further.
You've mentioned several applications that have known less reliability than the medical industry. Still, you should consider that the amount of reliance upon the software in the aforementioned applications is very small compared to the reliance on non-software based control systems. The fine level control (such as the guidance lock, stability, propulsion) are all handled by individual controllers almost all of the time.
In THIS application, the course control is handled by a human rather than a software AI. So no software is needed.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Yes, I could see this. But this is already happening, if you think about it. In my city, there are 3 hospitals, all which are horrifically understaffed. The entire medical community is spread out like thin bread over butter... Is it like that in other places? I believe that the next big thing in medicine may just be the middle men, in essence the nurse practicioners: People with a RN degree and a masters in some medical science that have the authority to perscribe but can't do surgery. (not sure in this, they may be able to soon, if it hasn't happened already...) But imoho that will be the next wave. Less people are becoming doctors so that just might be necessary.