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Bringing Surgical Robots Into the Mainsteam
The New York Times is running a story about how using robots to perform surgical operations has been transformed from a controversial dream to reality. Dr. Frederic Moll abandoned his residency for Silicon Valley and helped to revolutionize the industry. The lengthy article also discusses some of his innovations. We've discussed various robot-assisted medical procedures in the past. From the Times:
"'I was struck by the size of the incision and injury created just to get inside the body,' Dr. Moll says. 'It felt antiquated.' He took the idea to his employer, Guidant, a medical device company. Guidant decided that robotic surgery was too futuristic and too risky, so Dr. Moll rounded up backers, resigned, and in 1995, founded Intuitive Surgical. The company prospered by proving that robots could deftly handle rigid surgical tools like scalpels and sewing needles through small incisions in a patient's skin."
There are experiments or ongoing efforts(don't remember which) towards robots that can operate on a beating heart, something a human surgeon simply can't do. So some of the technology is actually additive, rather than simply useful as an emergency backup.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I kind of doubt it. This device is likely going to be mainly used to do things a surgeon is bad at, and is never going to be good at (nerve fibers in a prostate surgery), or tedious, time consuming things better left to a robot. It seems unlikely it'll put you out of a job.
What I _do_ hope though is that this device can lower costs by reducing complications, or having fewer assistants during a surgery, or perform more surgeries/day, etc. Your first paragraph is all wrong. This is nothing more than a fancy scalpel. Albeit one with tremor-dampening, and fancy haptics/cameras but still a tool nonetheless. If there is not a person with their hands on the controls, the Da Vinci will sit there and occasionally beep. It enables a person to do things like nerve surgery because it translates large scale, tremor-filled movements into small scale, absolutely smooth ones.
You are correct that it can possibly reduce complications, although there are no studies as of yet saying so and it is much more expensive.
Yes, I have used a Da Vinci.
The FDA approves all medical devices like automated external defibrillators and surgical robots. It's a long, expensive process that is considerably less fungible than, say, pharmaceutical trials.
I've worked with a lot of the surgical robots and voice control systems available in the past decade, and they're much more reliable and consistent in manual performance than whatever random surgeon happens to be on call that day. Sure, a doc always has to be driving the thing -- they're nowhere near autonomous (that's still decades away for even simple things), but the point of the robotics is not to remove the expert decision-making of the doctor, it's to eliminate the mechanical aspects of surgery where most things go unpredictably wrong. Just brushing your glove up lightly against the wrong piece of anatomy can cause major internal bleeding, not to mention how difficult it is to precisely control your hands for every split second of a 14-hour long procedure where doctors might have to trade off several times with all sorts of tools still inside the patient.
The robotics also make an unbeatable teaching tool. The surgeons in 50 years are going to be vastly superior to even the docs we have today, because they'll not only be able to watch from the chief's POV from day one of their residency, they'll be used to rehearsing every procedure in the simulator beforehand and handing off the controls to different specialists elsewhere for a few minutes whenever they need.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.