Surgery

Clay Barritt had surgery at Regions Hospital on Wednesday to repair a valve in his heart. The 60-year-old from Turtle Lake, Wis., is not unlike the thousands of people in the area who have procedures like this every year. But what's different about Barritt is that he had a robot assist in his surgery -- a medical first in Minnesota.

If you didn't know any better you might be forgiven for thinking there was an All Blacks game playing on the TV at Tauranga's Grace Hospital yesterday.

The group of men and women watching the TV at the hospital are all clad in purple smocks and surgical masks and have a similar intensity to those who watch big rugby matches.

June 5th 2007

While recent advances in neurosurgery have made it possible to precisely target areas in the brain with minimum invasiveness -- using a small hole to insert a probe, needle or catheter -- there remains a disadvantage. The small size of the openings reduces or eliminates direct site visibility and requires greater dexterity, stability and precision by the surgeon.

In Israel, a miniature robot has been developed to guide surgeons through delicate spinal cord operations. Doctors say the robot also reduces the chance of injury to patients.

Called the SpineAssist, the robot was invented by Moshe Shoam... and his company in the coastal Israeli city of Caesarea also manufactured it.

The Boston Globe describes the efforts of a Japanese-born scientist to develop new technologies for use in surgery. His last project is to build a swimming robot designed to explore the human gastrointestinal tract (GI tract) from esophagus to colon. This 2-centimeter long robot will have a swimming tail to deliver the energy picked from the outside and use it to steer it in the GI tract.

SEATTLE, WA, United States (UPI) -- A newly developed surgical robot called Raven will spend 12 days next month submerged in a simulated U.S. spaceship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The robot -- developed by the University of Washington -- will be studied inside a 400-square-foot underwater habitat that`s used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for space simulations and training.

U.S. scientists have created a robotic device that can be inserted onto a heart using minimally invasive surgery to deliver medical treatment.
Resembling a robotic caterpillar, the device developed by Cameron Riviere and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University can crawl across the surface of a beating heart, delivering drugs or attaching medical devices.

The world's first truly 'smart' robotic micro-drill has been used in a surgical operation at a university hospital in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

The surgical robot was developed by Professor Peter Brett from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University.

The smart robot does not need to be programmed or operated by a human from a computer.

According to medical experts, the future of surgery is bright, though it may soon trade its traditional human touch for a more precise robotic one.

Robotic surgery isn't itself new, but "Haptic" robots -- which draw their name from the Greek word for touch -- are taking surgical technology to a new level.

The first robotic heart operation was performed in the Czech Republic in Prague's Na Homolce hospital this week, hospital spokeswoman Jitka Kalouskova told CTK today.

Six patients suffering from heart failure underwent the unique operation using robotic systems.