How will robotics help advance medicine?
Just as new technologies turned once-major surgeries into outpatient procedures, robotics will allow surgeons to access the body in ways they couldn't before, explains Gregory Hager, PhD, chair of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.
Transcript
What robotics is going to do is to set the stage for innovations, where we now get access to the human body in ways
that we couldn't get access to it before, in ways that are far less injurious to the patient at hand.
[INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING] Think of surgery in the late '70s, early '80s.
It was actually before video laparoscopy existed. If you take a very common procedure, a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, so removing the gallbladder,
in the late '70s, early '80s, that was a major procedure. You went in, they opened up your flank
to get access to your gallbladder, they removed it, and then you had a multi-day hospital stay to recover,
and then you eventually went home. When we were able to finally put cameras on the end of laparoscopics and endoscopes,
now, suddenly, you could use a small incision to peek inside the body. Tools were created that allowed you
to get your hands effectively inside the body through small keyholes, and now, suddenly, you could remove a gallbladder without doing
that huge incision. Now, in the early days, it took a long time, because we didn't really know how to do laparoscopic surgery,
but that technique got refined to the point that, now, it is an outpatient procedure. You walk in in the morning, the surgeon does the surgery.
By noon, you walk out and you recover at home, and it's no longer considered to be a major procedure. For example, Intuitive Surgical, when they initially started up,
one of their advances was they could do minimally invasive cardiac surgery, so they could do cardiac bypass through incisions
between the ribs, as opposed to cracking the rib cage. But there are limits to what they're able to do with their current technology,
because the tools themselves are straight tools, so, in some sense, your means of access is anything you can get to with a straight line.
But there are now new advances in the offing where, instead of using straight-line tools, we use what we call "snake robots,"
robots that can reshape themselves anywhere along their body. Now you don't have straight line access anymore.
So, for example, you can get access to the back side of the heart with a snake robot, where, with a straight tool, you wouldn't
be able to get access to it. So that's where, really, the advances are going to take place. We're going to find more and more,
we can provide access to parts of the body that we can't get access to before. We're going to be able to do it at a scale
that we can't do it right now. So, for example, with cancer, we know that early detection is key in cancer,
and we're really getting to the point that we can detect cancer at millimeter scale. You can see lesions that, before, we
couldn't have seen because of advances in imaging. But, now, to actually find that lesion, to actually remove it,
again, that's a superhuman task, but robotics, coupled with this imaging means that now, suddenly, we can get access to those spaces.
We can find the lesion that you're trying to remove, and we can remove it in a minimally invasive fashion.
I don't know where this is going to go yet, but I've got to believe that, if we look at surgery in 20 or 30 years, it's going to look very different than what
it looks like now, because we're going to just have new tools that just allow you to do things that, right now, we almost can't imagine them.
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