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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".
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.
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.
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