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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.
It is the simplest thing in the world for power to the robot to be automatically cut off as soon as transmissions frmo the surgeon to the robot cease, and I'm pretty sure that the system has at least that elementary failsafe built in. So this, at least, would not be something to get nervous about.
what a country! the ROBOTS fix the HUMANS!