DaVinci Robotic Surgery

The future of surgery

The da Vinci^® Surgical System offers a minimally invasive alternative to both open surgery and laparoscopy. Because it requires only a few tiny incisions and offers greater vision, precision and control for the surgeon, patients often can recover sooner, move on to additional treatments if needed and get back to daily life more quickly.

Potential benefits of the da Vinci system for patients include:

• Reduced pain
• Lower risk of infection or complications
• Less blood loss (fewer transfusions)
• Shorter hospital stays
• Less scarring
• Faster return to normal activities (e.g., sexual function, urinary continence)

How it works

In traditional minimally invasive surgery, the surgeon operates while standing, using hand-held instruments that cannot bend or rotate. The surgeon must look up and away to a nearby standard 2D video monitor to see an image of the target anatomy.

With the da Vinci System’s ergonomic design, the surgeon is able to operate from a comfortable, seated position at a console, with eyes and hands in line with the instruments, and a magnified, high-definition 3D view of the target anatomy.

“The addition of robotic surgery and the da Vinci Surgical System offers patients leading-edge, individualized options that are both minimally invasive and supportive of quality of life,” says Dr. Charles Komen Brown, Surgical Oncologist at Midwestern Regional Medical Center. “With this innovative technology, surgeons gain more vision, precision and control while making smaller, less invasive incisions.”

Seated comfortably at an ergonomically-designed console, the surgeon first makes a few tiny incisions to introduce miniaturized instruments and a high-definition camera inside the patient. The camera allows the surgeon to view a highly magnified, high-resolution 3D image of the surgical site.

With eyes and hands in line with the instruments, the surgeon uses controls below the viewer to move the instrument arms and camera. The system then translates, in real time, the surgeon’s hand, wrist and finger movements into precise movements of the instruments inside the patient.

Throughout the procedure, the surgeon controls every surgical maneuver. The System cannot be programmed or act in any way without the surgeon’s input.

Most people don’t like to talk about it, but having a gastrointestinal problem is common.

There’s no need to suffer in silence. Here’s a top-to-bottom look at nine of the most prevalent digestive conditions, their symptoms, and the most effective treatments available. If you suspect you could have one of these issues, don’t delay in speaking with your doctor.

1. Chest Pain: Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)
When stomach acid backs up into your esophagus — a condition called acid reflux — you may feel a burning pain in the middle of your chest. It often occurs after meals or at night, says Neville Bamji, MD, a clinical instructor of medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital and a gastroenterologist with New York Gastroenterology Associates.

While it’s common for people to experience acid reflux and heartburn once in a while, having symptoms that affect your daily life or occur at least twice each week could be a sign of GERD, a chronic digestive disease that affects 20 percent of Americans, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).

Most people find relief by avoiding the foods and beverages that trigger their symptoms and/or by taking over-the-counter antacids or other medications that reduce stomach acid production and inflammation of the esophagus; however, some cases of GERD require stronger treatment, such as medication or surgery.

If you experience persistent heartburn, bad breath, tooth erosion, nausea, pain in your chest or upper part of your abdomen, or have trouble swallowing or breathing, see your Matthew Johnson, MD your Desert Surgical Associates doctor.

Medical technology is getting weirder by the day. But I mean that in a good way. Take the iKnife for example. It’s a surgical knife that actually vaporizes tissue, and then analyzes the smoke that comes out so that a surgeon can know if she’s cutting into cancerous cells, or healthy margins. Or what about mechanical leeches? They pretty much do what medicinal leeches do, only with less chance of a bacterial infection and a lot less…writhing.

There’s only so much improvement you can do to a tool before you eventually have to turn your attention to the hand that holds that tool. And that’s where robotic surgery comes in. So do you remember the autonomous surgery pod in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus? How far away are we from something like that? Well, not as far away as you might think.

You see, robotic surgery and computer-assisted medicine are already doing amazing things right now. And the potential for what they could do in the future could change medicine forever! One of the most common surgical robots is the da Vinci line. Da Vinci is focused on translating a surgeon’s control movements into direct action upon a patient. So every time a human moves, the robot moves. Unless of course a T-Rex happens to be walking by, in which case the robot actually filters out any of those little hand tremors. So that way you get pure control. No error.

Another advantage of robot surgeons is the chance for telesurgery. So lets assume that you’re some sort of futuristic penguin research scientist and you’re on assignment off the coast of Antarctica, when suddenly you need an appendectomy. But your ship is completely trapped by ice and your ship’s surgeon has been, I don’t know, kidnapped by ice pirates or something. What do you do? Well essentially you Skype it in. A surgeon on the mainland sits down at a terminal and supervises robotically assisted telesurgery via satellite uplink.

Another advantage is minimally invasive procedures. Now see traditional open surgery can leave big scars, they can take a long time to heal, and there’s a lot of pain involved in recovery. But what if instead of making a four inch incision in your stomach, we were able to do the same procedure using instruments put through little half-inch holes. Now human doctors have been doing minimally invasive procedures for years, but honestly there’s only so much human hands can do through these tiny holes in your skin. But robotic precision means those incisions have gotten smaller and smaller over time. And if we continue through this miniaturization rabbit hole, who knows? Maybe one day there’ll be barely a notion of what an in-patient procedure is.

Now the future for robotic surgery is wide open. Just take a look at what people have created with the Raven line. This is an open-source robotic surgeon and, sure, it looks like a couple of mechanical spider arms, but the important thing here is research. You see it creates a common platform for people to do experiments which will determine the future of robotic surgery.

But beyond all that, instead of just talking about robotic assisted surgeries, lets talk about their full potential. We’re talking autonomous robot surgeons. With machine learning, a robot surgeon could potentially study all the information from successful procedures in the past and apply that to learn how to do those procedures in the future. And if they prove to be as good or better than human surgeons, maybe we wouldn’t even go to hospitals to have surgery. Instead if you expected to have a surgery, you might buy a robot surgeon for the home, or for the office, or for the spacecraft.

 

Robot Docs Are the Future of Medicine