First Autonomous Robot Surgery a Success
Carlo Pappone, head of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Milan’s San Raffaele University, recently initiated and monitored an operation via camera from Boston that was taking place in Milan. While surgeries and other medical diagnostic and treatment tools are frequently done with the aid of cameras linked via the Internet, this time there was a human on one side of the connection and a robot on the other conducting the actual operation without the assistance of a human surgeon.
The surgery was conducted on a 34 year old patient suffering from atrial fibrillation. It took 50 minutes to successfully complete the operation which was watched by dozens of heart specialists who were attending a conference in Boston.
This was not the first surgery done by the robot. Pappone is confident that his machine is at least as competent as a human surgeon. In fact, the robot has more experience than some of its human equivalents, with over 40 operations under its belt. Having learned what it knows, or was programmed to know, by gathering experience from some 10,000 operations, the robot has the experience of several human doctors incorporated into its software.
Carlo Pappone, head of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Milan’s San Raffaele University, recently initiated and monitored an operation via camera from Boston that was taking place in Milan. While surgeries and other medical diagnostic and treatment tools are frequently done with the aid of cameras linked via the Internet, this time there was a human on one side of the connection and a robot on the other conducting the actual operation without the assistance of a human surgeon.
The surgery was conducted on a 34 year old patient suffering from atrial fibrillation. It took 50 minutes to successfully complete the operation which was watched by dozens of heart specialists who were attending a conference in Boston.
This was not the first surgery done by the robot. Pappone is confident that his machine is at least as competent as a human surgeon. In fact, the robot has more experience than some of its human equivalents, with over 40 operations under its belt. Having learned what it knows, or was programmed to know, by gathering experience from some 10,000 operations, the robot has the experience of several human doctors incorporated into its software.
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