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Technology

Heart Surgery By Robot 57

Posted by timothy from the eentsy-weentsy dept.
zebidee writes: "I've always been pretty amazed at the advances they continue to make in the field of medical science but this one really does take top prize. The BBC is reporting that the clever boffins at St. Mary's Hospital in London are preparing to use a new robotic arm to carry out heart bypass surgery using the da Vinci system developed by Intuitive Surgical. Read more about on the BBC News page. This really is the 21st century!"
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Heart Surgery By Robot More

Heart Surgery By Robot

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  • "Segregation" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Segregation. The protagonist needs a heart replacement. The surgeon tries to talk the protagonist into getting a biological heart, but the patient insists on a metal heart. The surgeon doesn't like it. He thinks that people should stay purely biological, and robots should stay purely metal.

    The story ends with the surgeon sticking his hands in the autoclave in preparation for the operation ... and the glow reflects off his metal face ...

  • This individual is posting a bunch of "informative" links that happen to be the first things google has returned on the topic. They have done that several times, if you check their user info. One wonders whether they are trying to boost their karma so that they are able to troll at +2 . . .
  • >Last week when my friend broke his arm, he did a
    >few miles on a treadmile, and nows he's back
    >playing Squash!

    >I'm poping in at lunchtime to get this genetic
    >heart disorder fixed. I reckon 10 Miles on the
    >cycle should do it.

    You are overlooking the fact that the money spend on the surgery perhaps could save more lifes if used differently.

    I am not saying that we shouldn't have any surgery at all, not even that we should not have robotic surgery, but operations can become so expensive that if used they will cause other people their life through negligence.

    You just don't see those people complaining on tv because they are in good health.
  • Surgery hasn't really added anything to public health on average. Only a few months added average lifespan.

    Clean water, high quality foods, preservatives, better housing and penicillin has been the real life savers. With average lifespans going from around 30 to around 70 years due to those.

    So instead of using a lot of money on Robotic heart surgery it would be better to build health gyms. That would increase avg. lifespan more than C3PO with a knife.

    Now that the genome is mapped there will be an explosion in proteomics (gene and protein) research and then we will start to get somewhere with cancer, virus and bacteria.

    Come nano we can hopefull live for several hundred years.

    Robotic surgery ... Hah! I laugh at robotic surgery. It's a dead end.

    But I hope it will be there if I ever need it.

  • Ekkk! (Score:1)

    by matth ( 22742 )
    I don't know about others, but personally I would much rather have a human do heart sergery on me, then trust it to a robot. Granted, computers are great, and for things that are the same over and over they are good, but there is just to much that is different and can change from person to person. I don't think we currently (or ever probably) will have the technology to allow a robot to do open heart segery on a person.

  • As long as it's not being run by Kevin Warwick [kevinwarwick.org.uk]...

  • Yes we do. We have a whole range of electric toothbrushes, toothpicks, dental floss, whitening toothpastes and private dental health in the UK, thank you very much.

    Sure, nobody buys any of the stuff, but it is available. :-)

    Anyway, the main reason for having these robots controlled by a doctor is that there is a shortage of doctors in the UK. Using these, one doctor can perform surgery on many patients at the same time. All the patients are lined up next to each other, with their own robot, and the doctor lies in his jacuzzi with his robot controller and Quake III in front of him, and then surgery can proceed... Brings a new meaning to deathmatch for sure, but it increases the hospitals turnover no end, which gives it a high rating.

  • Why don't those other lamers read the article?

    This is not a surgery robot, it is a waldo. OK, it is a very fancy, very cool waldo with nice features like scaling down movements for precision surgery, and automatically smoothing out shaking hands.

    PS: please mod up this message's parent!
  • Granted, not a new idea. The BBC article, although well written, mistakens it for a robot. It it not intelligent. It is merly an extention of the doctors hands. I think this is a great step in the right direction. The more development work in this area will help to reduce heal times and complications from surgy. Look at all the operations on peoples knees to replay a torn ACL. Before, you had scars up and down your knee. now, it is just two little dots, and the heal time is much faster.

    Imagine what this can do for brain surgery. No more cutting the skull open.. just a small hole and work in there!

  • You may have seen the Royal Institute Christmas Lectures for Children this year, where I believe this device was demonstrated.

    For those unfamilair with them, the RI lectures are a series of lectures, first started by Michael Farady, given by a distinguished scientist, for children. Even as an adult they continue to fascinate; this year they had Prof. Keven Warwick (one of the few people with "ex-cyborg" written in their CV ;-) talking about robots.

    I still remember when I was a kid Carl Sagan giving the lectures - hopefully kids today are getting the same inspiration.

  • Fair enough. German surgeons at the Leipzig Heart Center [cnn.com] did it 32 months ago. :P

    I see my original post was modded down as redundant, even though it was the second post in this article and the first was a link to goatse.cx. Nice to see the moderation system works so well, eh?

    -Legion

  • Fuck you moderator. Like nothing you've ever written is offtopic.
  • Yeah, so I didn't read the article and its not a robot performing surgery instead its doctor controlled robot arms... sue me.

    psxndc

  • Yeah, I agree.

    Last week when my friend broke his arm, he did a few miles on a treadmile, and nows he's back playing Squash!

    I'm poping in at lunchtime to get this genetic heart disorder fixed. I reckon 10 Miles on the cycle should do it.

  • Brings a whole new meaning to the word hack...

    Bob the Martian

  • But it's right to dismiss him because he's a media whore, doesn't back up his speculation with logic and still calls it science, and gives crap lectures with really bad demonstrations (i.e. can't even get a pendulum to work right).

    Oh and he has a chip in his arm, which communicates with one in his wife's arm, and reads his muscle movements, and somehow makes him a cyborg. As Jeremy Paxman said in a radio 4 interview with him, "So it doesn't do anything a human couldn't"
  • Not average, maybe. But medicine is more worried about individual cases, where surgery on a child born with a hole in the heart (a fairly common condition, for childhood illnesses) adds 70 odd years. Plus surgery is used for fixing accidents and trauma, which will never go away.
  • You have it wrong. This system does not do the surgery itself, it is simply an enhancement of the keyhole stuff that people have been doing for ages. The difference is that rather than using direct manipulators and a single camera, two cameras are used and the tools are opperated remotly. It is basically a tele-presence system for surgons. its main advantages are that it is in stereo vision, giving the surgeon better control, and the opperator does not have to be over the patient, allowing for longer operations (as the surgeon will not get as tiered). Also the surgeon will have better control since s/he can change the sensitivity of the controls. As an extra bonus, since the robot hold the tools, there is no reason why more than the normal number of tools could not be used, since the surgeon can position and then leave them while s/he uses another tool. All round, I think this is a good thing, however I still think that preventative medicine is a much better place to spend all that money.
  • ...is one giant leap for space travel. This is an example of the type of technology we'll need if we ever want to go to Mars, let alone further. One of the major considerations for space travel is the health factor. If an astronaut breaks her leg or suffers a coronary, she'll need medical attention. If we could develop a faster means of communication through space, one of these remote-controlled surgeons could be the solution. That way, instead of just having one flight doctor, the astronauts could receive medical help from a conglomerate of surgeons and specialists. "Johns Hopkins, we have a problem..."
  • That the operating system running these things is NOT Microsoft Windows...

    I can only imagine my robot surgeon getting a blue screen of death right in the middle of surgery... And if a reboot were to be only option to fix it :) I wonder if the robot would know where it left off?
  • I know nothing about surgery, but I wonder how much a surgeon relies on feel during delicate procedures. The da Vinci system certainly affords a far greater deal of precision than is normally available, but is this a factor that needs to be considered when designing these remote surgery systems?
  • I am aware of the fact that it is not a robot performing the surgery in this case, but I do think that it might happen in the future. Ok, maybe not near future ... but I can already see the comments of the people from the 23rd century when they discuss being operated by a `human'.

    "Can you imagine? You yourself, try to hold your hand streched and still. Would you have someone with that kind of `precision' perform surgery on you? Well, I sure as [orwellian censorship in the future] don't."

    "Yeah, I'd rather be operated by a robot running Windows 2004 than by a human ..."

    "He he ..."
  • I've never been to one of his lectures, but they can't be that bad since he was selected to present for the Royal institution.

    Being a "media whore" doesn't make him wrong.

    And having a chip in his arm does make him a cyborg. Its a piece of electronics which communicates directly with his body. What are your requirements? That he has his brain implanted into a robot body?
  • Admittedly, some of his specualtions are somewhat speculative. However, he is one of the worlds leading minds in the fields of robotics and cybernetics. He is also the worlds first cyborg. It would be wrong to dismiss him simply because you don't unsderstand his theories.
  • "Sir, are you classified as human?"
    "Negative, I am a meat popsicle."
  • Definitions:

    Cyborg: a bionic human being

    Bionic: having normal biological capability or performance enhanced by or performed by electronic or electromechanical devices

    (courtesy of Merriam Webster)

    Therefore, although Warwick, by definition, qualifies as a cyborg, people who wear glasses do not. Nor do people who have hip replacements, as there is no electromechanical part. Pacemakers, however, do qualify.

    Kierthos
  • here are more articles on the da vinci system.

    ROSSLYN, Va., July 28, 1999 [ask.com]
    ABCNews.com December 17, 2000 [go.com]
    siliconvalley.com Wednesday, July 12, 2000 [mercurycenter.com]

  • I believe technically speaking anyone who wears glasses is a cyborg. Also medical implants of various types (hip replacements, even rudimentary auditory replacements) have been used for a number of years.
  • all very nice to know when your fat ass suffers a heart attack
  • I'm a welding arm, not a doctor!

    Naeser's Law:

  • Well, yes. What's your point?

    That you like screaming?

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • maybe so, but there's a huge difference between a research facility like ohio state university doing it and st mary's, which is a "regular" hospital. plus it's in england, and they don't even have electric toothbrushes yet! hehehe ...
  • uhh, hello? why does this comment keep coming up? it's a tool, an aid to a surgeon. no computer is doing any surgery here, people! it's like using a film camera that has a stabilizing mechanism that takes out joslting of the camera -- it just makes it neater. just like how this system takes out the normal trembling of human hands, etc. sound better now?
  • Asimov must be turning on his grave! What was the name of the story he wrote about the robot surgeon ? For the life of me...can't think about it right now... Peace...
  • I agree, I would much rather have a computer assist a Dr if it allows him to perform a more accurate job. All of us get the shakes sometimes, a Dr with a scalpel is no exception.
  • "Yeah, I'd rather be operated by a robot running Windows 2004 than by a human ..." You sure about that?
  • Never mind that, check out an even earlier story on robo-surgery (including the Da Vinci machine) in forbes, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/0306/6506159a.ht ml
  • Telepresence surgery - or telesurgery - has some advantages. Want a surgical team available 24/7 in your libertarian/anarcho-capitalist techno-compound in Montana? Just buy a daVinci unit or two, plug 'em into your OC3 switch, subscribe to a surgical outsourcing service, and you can receive world-class surgery for a bargain price, anytime. All you'll need is a couple of nurses to do the dirty work: setting bones, picking splinters out of your eye, etc. But there is a down side: Once inexpensive telesurgery units are available, every HMO will buy them in lieu of actual surgical staff. They'll outsource to the low bidder and pass the savings on to you - or maybe just keep it. "Welcome to TeleKnife Customer Service. Do you have a problem related to a surgery performed by TeleKnife? If you are bleeding profusely or slipping out of consciousness, press 1 now. If you think your newly transplanted organ is being rejected by your body, press 2. If you want to upgrade to a 1 year warranty on your recent surgical procedure, press 3..." NEXT STOP: Surgery from a vending machine. (Not responsible for lost quarters.)
  • > Yeah, I'd rather be operated by a robot running Windows 2004 than by a human ...

    You mean Whistler? Eeek.

  • I don't remember that part. Must be some uncorrectable memory errors.

    Before I read the article, I was thinking along the lines of the scene in `Logan's Run' when the laser cosmetic surgery machine goes berserk.

    In response to those who say they'd rather trust a human holding a scalpel: I think I'd prefer to stay healthy so I don't need the bypass surgery.


    --

  • Yep. You're right. But, I'll still avoid robotic surgery.
    --
  • Open source can have bugs too. It is more important that the thing is properly tested. And as far as I know the rules are pretty strict for medical software.

    And as for windows, It wouldn't surprise me if they did use it for parts of the system. Probably the actual control software runs on some real-time OS, but there's more to complex systems like that than control software alone.

    And you'd be wrong to assume that because of that the quality suffers. Using of the shelf components like MS windows in medical software greatly improves functionality of the system. I've heard of several examples where a windows based front-end complements control software written for some real time OS.
  • I would guess that the surgeon has to take their job as seriously as if they were in the operating room hacking away directly on the patient (i.e., try and avoid random muscle spasms which might cause the scalpel to cut through important stuff).

    If they're using haptic feedback (sense of touch & force feedback) then they probably are trying to set up some kind of proper hand/eye interface so that the surgeon can perform the normal types of movements that they are used to, and the robot will perform those same movements remotely (while transmitting back through the interface the same kinds of feelings that the surgeon would get if operating directly).

    As for your last issue, there's no reason why the robot has to operate on a 1-to-1 scale of movement - in fact, with the proper feedback, going through the robot could increase the surgeon's margin of error quite a bit. (On the other hand, surgeons might start thinking that they'll be able to operate even after a 24-hour bender and they're shaking with the DTs - "just make those movements REAL slow, Bettie!").
  • Before I read the article, I was thinking along the lines of the scene in `Logan's Run' when the laser cosmetic surgery machine goes berserk.

    I thought that had happened because the main computer had given instructions to the surgeon that he was supposed to kill Logan, so the surgeon programmed his laser-surgery machine to not perform the healing-part of the operation?

    On the other hand, that one robot which was capturing people who tried to get to Sanctuary & turning them into food...

  • I can see the benefit of this in terms of comfort from the surgeons point of view during lengthy operations, and in reducing incision sizes, therefore reducing patient recovery times.

    But, as this is still a device controlled by a human, are patients still susceptible to human error? For example, what happens if the surgeon slips and knocks the joystick while the robot arm is holding a scalpel? I haven't read the whole Da Vinci website so maybe I missed something, but are there any kind of built-in mechanisms to prevent sudden/eratic movements as opposed to slow/controlled movements?

    This could pose a problem if surgeons are dealing with smaller incisions as there could be less margin for error.

    ----------------------------
  • I'd feel very odd going under the knife of something that can't take randomness into account:

    Nurse: "Dr. Steele! He having an allergic reaction to the anesthesia! His blood vessels are dialiating! We're going to lose him!"
    Dr. Steele:"Nurse Ratchet, do be a dear and give me some of that WD40... my back is killing me"
    NR:"But Doctor..."
    DS:"*puke*Your operation has caused a general protection fault at 0x12314324214..."

    No thanks... I'll stick to the meat puppets, thank you.

  • IMHO if we develop a faster (than light, presumably) means of communication through space, we will no longer have problems going to Mars or anywhere else in the Universe instantaneously, so the health problem would not exist.

  • ...of possible heart surgery by a tin man.

    ---
  • I recall a few years ago watching a video of the first prototype Protate Gland removal robot in action (in the company of an aging robotician who was due into hospital a couple of dfays later to have the said operation done, but in a more conventional fashion). Excruciating. Plently of eye-watering links from google [google.com]
  • The company I work for, Cine-Med, Inc. [cine-med.com], made the interactive training simulator for the Da Vinci System. It's neat stuff seeing how the control grips allow you to achieve surgical precision.

    I'd love to see someone combine a couple foot pedals, a throttle, and two cyberman 3-D mice to come up with a joystick that works the same way. Of course, I'd also love to see two lemurs doing Vaudeville numbers on the 21st floor of the CSFB building in NYC. I guess I'm just weird like that.

  • I cannot beleive that they are using Royal's DaVinci PDA to run the thing.

  • Things you don't want to hear ... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @01:10AM (#521540)
    Top N things you don't want to hear in a bot-enhanced operating room:
    • "Watch me frag this guy!"
    • "The MP3 server is skipping again -- can you bump up its realtime priority?"
    • "Oh shit! We're getting slashdotted!"
    • "That pesky 'ph3ar me Y00 l8m3r' dialog box keeps popping up."
    • "Fuck all these warnings, I'm taking '-Wall' out of the Makefile".
    • "These Celerons are so great for overclocking."
    • "Check it out -- that hot radiologist says she loves me! I better read this e-mail right now!"
    • "Yeah, I'm running 2.5.3-pre7-ac12-dontuse. Why do you ask?"
    And the #1 thing you don't want to hear in a bot-enhanced operating room:
    • "LLLLLLAAAAAAAGGGGGGG!"

  • Article in MIT Technology Review (Score:3)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @04:07AM (#521541)
    RoboSurgeons [technologyreview.com], from the Nov/Dec 2000 issue. Complete with pictures and links.

  • Remember Rama? (Score:3)

    by abiogenesis ( 124320 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @03:14AM (#521542)
    This reminds me the novel by Arthur C. Clarke: Rama; where a robot surgeon cuts the spaceship personnel into peaces because it is not programmed to stop when anything unexpected happens (like the ship bumping into something)...

  • how about (Score:4)

    by zephc ( 225327 ) on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @12:24AM (#521544)
    Robot Surgery by Heart [musicfoto.com]?

    ------

  • 2nd hand experience (Score:5)

    by Basje ( 26968 ) <bas@bloemsaat.org> on Tuesday January 09, 2001 @01:38AM (#521545) Homepage
    My girlfriend is a PHD student, and she is currently doing research in medical technology. Recently she's had a demonstration of this device. After that demonstration, they were allowed to handle the machine and try some manipulations.

    From what I understood:
    1. This is not an intelligent robot, but a tool for the surgeon. Sensors are connected to the surgeons hands and arms, and they are transmitted to the operational device. It still is the surgeon which does the operation.

    2. Resistance, which I saw mentioned in one of the other responses, is simulated to the surgeon doing the operation. Thus, a more 'natural' feel is created.

    3. This device and devices like it are great tools for Minimal Invasive Surgery (MIS). Because the opening doesn't have to be large at all, and devices can be sterilized, this greatly reduces the risk of infection.

    4. If developments continue along this line, and there is no reason to believe they won't, operation rooms may become obsolete for many operations: a closed sterile device is pressed against the area where the opening has to come. All that has to be sterile is the insides of the operation device.

    ----------------------------------------------

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