Medibots: The world's smallest surgeons

[Soylent Brice]

A MAN lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel, probes around inside the man's abdomen then withdraws one of its arms. Held in the machine's claw is a neatly sealed bag containing a scrap of bloody tissue.

This is a da Vinci robot. It has allowed a surgeon, sitting at a control desk, to remove the patient's prostate gland in a manner that has several advantages over conventional methods. Yet the future of robotic surgery may lie not only with these hulking beasts but also with devices at the other end of the size spectrum. The surgeons of tomorrow will include tiny robots that enter our bodies and do their work from the inside, with no need to open patients up or knock them out. While nanobots that swim through the blood are still in the realm of fantasy, several groups are developing devices a few millimetres in size. The first generation of "mini-medibots" may infiltrate our bodies through our ears, eyes and lungs, to deliver drugs, take tissue samples or install medical devices.

*snip*

Operating on the heart has always presented enormous challenges, says Marco Zenati, a heart surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who is one of the device's inventors. Conventionally the heart is stopped and the patient hooked up to a heart-lung machine. A more recent approach is to perform keyhole surgery on the beating heart, but even so several incisions must be made, and the left lung must be partly deflated to allow access, requiring a general anaesthetic.

The HeartLander robot is designed to be delivered to the heart through a single keyhole incision, from where it can crawl to the right spot. The heart does not have to be stopped, and the left lung need not be deflated, so the patient could be breathing naturally, with just a local anaesthetic. "Coronary surgery can become an outpatient procedure," says Cameron Riviere, the team's roboticist, based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427351.100-medibots-the-worlds-smallest-surgeons.html

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Just wait till these things get uppity.

[lapfog_1]

2. When I had heart surgery... now many years ago...

It was all by remote control catheters (5 in number). I was on a table with a large imaging system over my chest, two catheters were run in to the jugular vein and three more were inserted via a large vein in the groin.

There was a small screen that I could see (the doctors were all clustered around a desk a few feet away with a larger version of the screen) where I watched them snake the catheters into my heart. It was very surreal.

I would go in and out as they would stop and restart my heart while using a small microwave tip to burn (sort of like welding) parts of the interior of my heart muscle, creating scar tissue over the entry points for the extra electrical pathways I had been born with (something called WPW or Wolfe-Parkinson-White Syndrome).

It was very, very cool. And I'm very lucky to have lived to a technological age where such surgery is possible.

Of course, since that day I haven't had a dime of health insurance except when I've worked for very large companies, and even then, nothing that covers cardiology. $35,000 surgery. And I still had a bill from the hospital for $10K more waiting for me when I got home... charges that my insurance wouldn't pay.

The only thing cooler would have been Bones waving a flashing wand over my chest and declaring me "healed".

[CurtEastPoint]

3. Shame on you! That made me laugh and I had an appendectomy Monday and it hurts!

Laughing is so good but it still makes me hurt a bit. Talk about going rogue! What if one of these is programmed wrongly and it snips an aorta or something?