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The State of Robotic Surgery
kkleiner writes "Robotic surgery is experiencing explosive growth in America's operating rooms, and the unquestioned industry leader in this field is the DaVinci robot, made by Intuitive Surgical. Only 14% of prostate surgeries in the US last year took place not using the DaVinci. Installations have grown from 210 systems seven years ago to 1,395 today. Although typically used for smaller surgeries like prostate removal and hysterectomies, the system was recently used for a kidney transplant, and more complicated procedures are expected in the future. The DaVinci is really just the first wave of robotic surgery as technology continues to push clumsy human hands out of the operating room." The article mentions some of the downsides, or perhaps the growing pains, of DaVinci robotic surgery: "According to a large study of Medicare patients, robotic prostate surgery led to fewer in-hospital complications, but had worse results for impotence and incontinence ..." Another company makes a simulator to train surgeons on the DaVinci. Embedded in the article is a 2009 TED talk on DaVinci by a surgeon.
A member of my family has been doing this type of work for several decades. I have been studying genetics and developing a mitochondrial operating system. It is merely a concept which I think is workable. It would transform the organism in such a way that it could function as several trillion parallel process control computers. It takes a long time to bring a concept as complex as this from idea to implementation. I have been working on it for seven years now and expect that it will be a reality eventually if nothing else seems a better approach.
I do wonder what it means though. At first it seemed a really neat idea and the methods are not much more difficult than maintaining an open source OS. It does seem that if every cell contains the necessary data to evoke the organism, it would be no different than a liquid terminator or vampire in its result.
There are organisms which regenerate themselves from their parts. Members of Planariidae, for one. As it becomes more feasible it occurs to me that it is very odd in its consequence. I had a bad feeling when I first cloned an organism, as if I should not be allowed to do such a thing.
DARPA is considering experiments with genetically engineered soldiers merged with nano technology and electronic extensions. To paraphrase a common meme at slashdot , on the Internet, technology advances you.
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