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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.
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".
*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.
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
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.
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?
What do you think is scarier, having your chest peeled open like a book, or the alternative. As someone whose father just recently went through open heart surgery, I can say the process would be nerve racking either way.
And while the surgery is bad, the recovery is probably worse. Painful, long, and frustrating. Anything that can shorten the recovery process is a wonderful thing, IMHO.
"...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.
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Until this technology is perfected and absolutely error-free/failsafe/100% accurate, I'll opt for the human to do the surgery.
Yes, because human surgeons are perfect!
That's why malpractice insurance is so damn cheap.
It is of course horrible that someone was killed by this less intrusive surgery, when they might have lived with the more intrusive and more often performed traditional sternum-cracking surgery.
IANAMD, however I am certain it is not the first time that a new surgical technique designed to be less risky for the patient was actually more risky because of the novelty it presented the surgeons performing it. There's no way to leapfrog the novelty of the technique, but in the long run, for the general public, it will be less risky because it is less intrusive.
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.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
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?
I, for one, would much prefer to be operated on using this new system--the electronics damp out tremors, and I don't have to worry about a surgeon sneezing and lacerating my intestine. The trauma of major incisions is eliminated, saving me from weeks of hospital food, pain meds, and severe scarring.
Surgeons will take time to become accustomed to this new system. Without a gaping incision, it is harder to see what's going on. There are new failure modes possible. A nick in the aorta is immediately obvious in conventional surgery, not so much so under these conditions. There may also be a 'novelty' penalty. This is a new technique, so there aren't really any experts in the field who have performed thousands of procedures with these devices. There is a learning curve.
Nevertheless, medical decisions are usually made on the basis of a risk calculation. If there are fewer overall complications and deaths, then 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.
~Idarubicin
You're joking, right?
Look, this thing isn't a "robot" in any real sense -- it's not taking away control from the doctor, it's a sophisticated tool which has the potential to do as much for surgery in the next few decades as the laproscope did in the last few.
If the doctors start skipping steps, it's their fault, not the tool's. Like certain other people in this thread, you're applying Windows logic ("It should have done this for me and covered my ass!") in a UNIX situation -- the tool is meant to be used by someone who understands it and knows what they're doing.
If some newbie rm -rf's his filesystem, it's his fault, not the OS's.
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