Robots are getting ready to become our surgeons, military expert says

May 20th, 2008, 10:18 am by Colin Stewart
The future of surgery will soon arrive, says military adviser Dr. Richard M. Satava, bringing with it:
• Robot surgeons.
• Operating rooms containing no human other than the patient.
• Computerized microsurgery on the innards of human cells.
• A high-frequency ultrasound beam that can heal internal bleeding without surgery.
• Surgery by miniature robots released into the abdomen.
Those developments are either under way or logical outgrowths of current technology, Satava told the bio-engineering conference “Disruptive Technologies for the 21st Century: Engineering the Life Sciences,” held Monday, May 19, at UC-Irvine.
Although he has been predicting some of those amazing developments for more than a decade, Satava says many of them are coming close to reality. His talk was full of fascinating possibilities, but he explored no topic in depth.
Satava, of the University of Washington, is an expert on robotic surgery and virtual reality who has done extensive work on advanced military medicine with support from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Related links:
• Background information on Satava’s work and related subjects.
• Call him Dr. Robot, the man who saves lives with machines
• Brain surgeon teams with rocket scientists on high-tech tools
• A full transcript of my live reports on the conference and speakers’ observations on advances in the war against diseases including cancer, heart disease and cystic fibrosis.
Da Vinci surgical robots gain ‘incisionless surgery’ technology
May 12th, 2008, 4:13 pm by Colin Stewart
The makers of Da Vinci surgical robots have teamed up with USGI Medical, a leader in surgical devices for experimental operations performed through natural orifices such as the mouth.
San Clemente-based USGI announced today that it has licensed its surgical technology to Sunnyvale-based Intuitive Surgical for use in robotically assisted medical applications.
USGI calls its technology “incisionless surgery,” because its surgical system makes no external cut in a patient’s abdomen. Instead, for example, the cut is made through the stomach wall for an “incisionless” appendectomy.
The licensing deal opens the possibility of expanding the uses for Da Vinci robots, which so far have been most popular as a tool for improving surgeons’ accuracy in minimally invasive urology operations. Finances of the deal were not disclosed.
Surgeons used USGI’s EndoSurgical Operating System, or EOS, in the first operations that removed an appendix and a gall bladder through the stomach wall. Many doctors use the EOS routinely for reducing the size of the gastric pouch in patients who regain weight after gastric bypass surgery, USGI says.