1/07/2008

da Vinci - The Robotic Surgeon

Well, okay, it's not exactly a robotic surgeon, but with a real-life doctor at the helm it's certainly an incredible tool that makes for better surgeries. I'm talking about the da Vinci Surgical System that I was fortunate enough to check out at El Camino hospital in Mountain View last week. Without getting into too much geeky detail, it is basically a remote controlled robot with 4 arms (each with 7 degrees of freedom) that have interchangeable tools at the end of them. When a person goes in for surgery under da Vinci, instead of a seven or eight inch incision for a prostatectomy the patient receives five much smaller incisions that the arms of the robot can reach into to perform the same task. One of the robot's 8mm diameter arms is equipped with two high-intensity halogen lights fed through fiber optic lines, situated in between two more fiber optic cables that pipe to two high-definition video cameras. From this, the operator has stereo vision of what is going on inside the working area. The operator sits just ten feet away from the patient at the controls of da Vinci, and has control of two of the attached tools at a time by way of hyper-sensitive hand controls and a series of pedals. There is a VR-style headset the surgeon looks into while operating, giving a fully three-dimensional HD stereo view of what's going on. Of course I wasn't about to go performing surgery on anyone, so for my visit the very kind OR tech set up the practice tray for me to play with. It' essentially a miniature rubber playground with tiny rubber bands to play with. I was amazed at the engineering that went into this $1.7M robot - any old simpleton such as myself could sit down and pick it right up. Within a minute and a half I was maneuvering all over the tray, adjusting the camera, and expertly moving the little rubber pieces around. For such a large and involved machine, they had it simplified down to an understandable user interface. Basically, all this comes down to safer surgeries with much faster recovery times - some operations allow the patients to go home the same day of the surgery. Also, instead of having a large scar up the lower abdomen, patients are left with tiny incision marks that can completely heal in just a couple months. Ten years ago, it was a dream to think of a robot aiding in surgeries as da Vinci does several times a day at El Camino. It's hard to imagine what may be capable ten years from now - perhaps the human operator will be cut from the equation leaving just a computer controlling the robot, or perhaps something even more advanced that hasn't been thought up yet. Whatever it may be, it's technology like da Vinci that is enhancing people's lives today, and pushing against the boundaries of what is possible in the future.