Robots Enter the Operating Room
Tuesday, Mar 29, 2011 | Updated 11:45 PM CDT
In the movies, virtual reality is a daily part of life. But in some areas of medicine, it's how doctors are now beginning to cure their patients.
There are 3D movies, 3D video games and even 3D TV. And now surgeons are using a 3D console to change a patient’s heartbeat.
“My heart was beating 186 a minute so they got me to the hospital," said John Seraphin, who suffered from a run-away heartbeat that could kill him. The electrical system in his heart had gone haywire, and he needed a surgeon to erase the erratic circuit to get a normal rhythm back again.
Usually the surgeon does this by hand, by feeding a thin catheter inside a vein in the leg to the inside of the heart. That’s where the doctor has to twist the catheter very delicately to get it into position to touch the heart wall in exactly the right place to shut down the bad electrical signal.
But now doctors like Kousik Krishnan can manipulates the catheter by remote control. At Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, he sits at a 3D monitor of the heart and clicks on the spot on the screen where he wants the catheter to go. Then like a robotic eel, it twists and turns to the correct spot, where Dr. Krishnan has it shave away the tiny piece of tissue causing the problem.
"The 3D image allows me to know precisely where I am at all times," explained Dr. Krishnan. "The robot knows which views I’m in so I can always be driving the catheter to the right spot."
So far the $500,000 robot, called Sensei, has been used on procedures that can also be done by hand. But Dr. Krishnan hopes that in the future, the same technique can be used to get to areas in the body where normal catheters cannot go.
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