Robotic Surgery Blog: Robotic surgery future Archives

June 11, 2007

Robotic Future through the eyes of a pioneer

The Surgical Revolution In Minimal Access Surgery- The Robotic Connection

Dr. Satava, Professor of Surgery, University of Washington discussed that robots are 12-15 times faster and function with greater precision than humans. Robots can work around the clock without taking coffee breaks, he said. Information is a basis for surgery in the new age. "Holomer" is a total body scan to guide intra-operative navigation during surgery. A surgeon could then use this to perform a virtual operation on a patient prior to the real operation. A robot is an information machine, rather than a machine, he said. Thinking as such will permit greater integration into our healthcare system. The surgeon is then an information manager, and can integrate all aspects of the care to include preoperative planning, surgical approaches, etc. The robot can give 1mm accuracy using a virtual robot to practice an operation ahead of time on a virtual patient.

December 18, 2006

Haptics in the news

"It always helps to be able to feel what you are doing, to feel the tissue tension and to feel the force when manipulating a suture," says Domenico Savatta, chief of minimally invasive and robotic urology surgery at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. "Haptics would make it easier to learn robotic surgery, operate on things that are very delicate, and be an overall advantage to have in the system."

Source: Technology Review: Surgical Robots Get a Sense of Touch

This was a nice review in technology review, by Brittany Sauser.

I appreciate the chance to stress the importance of what haptics will mean to robotic surgery.

Currently I have learned to rely on a highly magnified image and what I call, "visual haptics". Having a 10 times magnified image with a camera that is a few inches away from the surgical field allows me to see the tension in tissue. I await the day when I can combine the visual haptics with touch.

I learned from this article that the team at John Hopkins is working on a visual haptic system that has dots that can change colors as a marker of tension.

I remember reading about a system that worked on auditory haptics, where a sound would increase in intensity with increasing tension.

December 9, 2006

The language of surgery

� A new ‘language’ for surgery? | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com

After watching surgeons using robotic systems for a while, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University have decided to borrow ideas from speech recognition research to build what they're calling a 'Language of Surgery'. In speech recognition, basic sounds are called phonemes. For surgery tasks, such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue, the basic steps have been named 'surgemes.' The mathematical models used by the researchers have several goals: evaluate a surgeon's work and help doctors to improve their operating room skills. They also want to 'enable robotic surgical tools to perform with greater precision.'

This was an excellent blog entry that gave more insight on how automated surgery may work. I have always been somewhat skeptical, but keep an open mind, about automated surgery.

Reading the original paper is recommended for scientists and enthusiasts of this topic.

I found it very interesting how they were able to take computer recorded motions and show a difference between expert and non-expert surgeons. I would like to know how they were able to classify these surgeons as expert.

My biggest problem with the concept of automated surgery is that surgery is not just science, but also art. I see this as a computer telling you if you are using correct technique, but the day is far away where it can be done truly automated. A fair comparison is to pitching in baseball. You can learn proper mechanics, but pitchers that have perfect mechanics do not always do well and pitcher s with poor mechanics or different delivery styles can thrive.

One are where I can see robotics helping in the near future can be to do some smaller steps that may be difficult to do, such as suturing a bladder to urethra, which can sometimes be difficult and is hard to learn.

November 19, 2006

Newark Beth Israel chosen for beta tests for daVinci upgrades

I had the opportunity to beta test the newest additions to the daVinci S robot.

The engineers have done an excellent job with minor upgrades.

The 4th pedal which had been empty was fitted with a bipolar pedal. This was a nice much awaited for addition that will make setup much easier as we had been taping a pedal over this.

The camera attachment was upgraded to an easier to click in piece. This didn't add much for my team, but will make it easier for new teams.

My favorite upgrade was a John Madden type drawing feature on the patient side screen or a non-sterile screen on the cart. I termed this the "robo-strator". This works by allowing a surgeon not on the robot to draw on the screen and having this image seen by the operating console surgeon. An excellent teaching tool that will be a must have for all centers with residents or fellows. I had some thoughts on how to upgrade this such as adding suture needles into the display.

There were also some minor console such as how to engage the robotic masters (joysticks).

Overall, I was pleased with each of the additions. The one upgrade I didn't see yet was an arm on the patient side screen to lower it to a more user-friendly level.

John Hopkins working on robotic advances

Johns Hopkins Gazette November 13, 2006: "Johns Hopkins researchers are trying to change that by adding such sensations, known as haptic feedback, to medical robotic systems. "Haptic" refers to the sense of touch.

A video showing some of this research is online at www.jhu.edu/news/audio-video/medical_robotics.html."

I thought this was an excellent video showing the davinci robot and some of the things that John Hopkins is working on.