Free Republic

India's first robot-assisted heart valve replacement surgery was conducted at a hospital here, doctors said Saturday. A 23-year-old male patient, who was diagnosed with mitral stenosis and severe mitral regurgitation (tight and leaky valve) and severe enlargement of the left atrium, is recovering fast after the robotically assisted valve replacement Sep 29, they said. R. Ravi Kumar, a cardiothoracic surgeon, told a news conference that the Care Hospital had achieved the distinction of being the first in India to perform this robot-aided procedure. 'While robotic surgeries have been done for the ASD ('hole in heart') closure and mitral valve repair...

Back in the 1980s, the rationale for building a surgical robot was the stuff of science fiction. Intent on providing "a doctor in every foxhole," military strategists envisioned a severely wounded soldier being loaded into a battlefield ambulance equipped with a robot so that a surgeon at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, miles away could perform life-saving telesurgery to prevent exsanguination or some other physiological catastrophe. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a similar vision. A terrestrial physician would be able to remove an acutely inflamed appendix from a patient aboard a robot-equipped space station. In...