Robotic Surgery: When Technology Meets Surgical Precision

Abstract

The objective of the following report is to represent a full & clear image of the latest technology in the field of surgery (Robotic Surgery) in a brief and easy way showing the advantages accompanied with this new type of surgery & the value it adds for both the patient & the surgeon. BACKGROUND OPEN SURGERY The surgery first started with Open Surgery which implied making a large incision in the patient's body to allow the full exposure of the surgical site and to give enough space for the surgeon to introduce his hands to do surgery. DISADVANTAGE Large incision resulted in more pain for the patient Patient needed to stay for long time in the hospital post operatively for wound healing. The big scar resulted from the surgery was annoying for patients specially females. MINIMAL INVASIVE SURGERY In the early 80's the Minimal Invasive Surgery was introduced. This type of Surgery was meant to avoid all the complications resulted from Open Surgery as it depended on small incisions for introducing the surgical Instruments to the field of Surgery. The Vision was acquired through a scope that displayed the image of the surgical site on a monitor display for the surgeon. DISADVANTAGE The Surgical instruments were Rod-like having no wrist movement at the tip which required from the surgeon to move his arms in large scale movements outside the patients body for the instrument tip (internally) to get to the desired location. The movement of the instruments/scope were awkward (counter-intuitive) meaning that if the surgeon wants to move the instrument/scope to the left, he has to move to the right from outside. The scope displays only a 2D image on the display which has no depth perception. The surgeon needed to over/under shoot the target anatomy to be able to allocate it properly. The Surgeon gets tired because he is hanging his arms all the case time in an awkward position (Hand Tremors) & twisting his neck to be able to follow up the surgical site displayed on the monitor. A lot of miscommunication resulted from MIS due to opposite directions and fatigue. ROBOTIC SURGERY: “DA VINCI” SURGICAL SYSTEM HISTORY The Robotic Industry started with what so called “Industrial Robots” which depended mainly on a pre-installed program that carries a pre-defined tasks to be performed automatically i.e. Car assembling robots, Production lines machines..,etc. The main advantage was that the robots were much faster and accurate than human beings to perform such tasks but still, a disadvantage of having no human control on the machine – the machine was fully independent – limited the use of these robots Robotic Surgery: When Technology Meets Surgical Precision 2 of 6 to tasks that needed only speed and mass production. A while after, a new kind of robots was invented “Tele-manipulated Robots”. These robots were invented to carry tasks that were considered dangerous for human beings to perform i.e. Oil mines drilling, moon surface exploring, deep see/volcano studies... etc. These robots were sent to such missions being controlled by humans from a control base. They depended on “Computer Assisted Technology” for translating the human command to a robotic action. THE “DA VINCI” SURGICAL SYSTEM In the mid nineties and specifically in 1995, a new revolutionary type of Surgery appeared which relied on utilizing the latest technology in the field of Computer Assisted Surgery to control and manipulate electromechanical devices. This new type of Surgery was given the name “Robotic Surgery” Robotic Surgery is performed in a similar way to Laparoscopic Surgery in the fact that it uses tiny incisions to introduce special types of instruments with the highest degrees of precision. The surgeon sitting comfortably on an operating console is able to view a very clear 3 Dimensional view of the surgical while controlling the arms of the robot which hold these special instruments together with the camera and scope. This ergonomic position for the surgeon has proved to re