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A friend had his prostate cancer removed by a daVinci robot. It’s supposed to minimize side-effects.
..... until the little red light turns on, I mean.
There’s more to this story than meets the eye. From Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24850/?a=f):
“The da Vinci robot is made by California-based Intuitive Surgical, the only big player in the robotic surgery arena (some other companies make robotic systems for eye and brain surgery). The company, founded in 1995, adapted technology originally developed for long-distance surgery—an application quickly abandoned—and created a broad patent portfolio around robotic surgery. It bought up early competitors, garnering Food and Drug Administration approval for its surgical system in 2000. And that’s largely where things have stood for the last decade.
“People have been disappointed in how slowly the robot is evolving,” says Jon Einarsson, a gynecological surgeon at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. “There hasn’t been a lot of evolution or improvement in the articulation at the tip of the instrument.” Some innovations that Einersson would like to see are haptics—a sense of touch that can be translated from the robotic instruments to the surgeon—and a way to incorporate data from magnetic resonance imaging.
Some surgeons and engineers argue that a much smaller and cheaper device could provide the same visual advantages and flexibility, but that no one has been able to move this forward. “The da Vinci robot looks like it was designed to make automobiles—it’s great big clunky gear,” says Kirby Vosburgh, an engineer with the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT), in Boston, who previously designed medical technology for General Electric...”
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Things could be going a lot better. This Intuitive Surgical sounds like the Microsoft of robotic medicine.