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.

Comments

Re:don't trust it...

[tetro]

Bender from Futurama! Don't trust him either.