You can find them in Hollywood movies, like Short Circuit, Robocop, and even the classic
cartoon The Jetsons. Robots seem to be everywhere. Ask anyone on the street to give a pop culture
reference to robots, and you might hear… Robots are not only a hit at the box office…
What does it mean? They're making their way into people's homes, vacuuming their
floors, and cleaning their pools, which is a giant leap from the first robot invented
by Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago. And now there's a robot that can perform
surgery? Well, sort of. In today's operating room, you might find doctors using a robotic
surgical system called the da Vinci. The da Vinci is a set of instruments that allow
us to have better control of laparoscopic instrumentation. So it's an improvement on
laparoscopic surgery. Laparoscopic surgery is surgery that's done through very small
incisions, where a camera is inserted into the body cavity, in this case into the abdomen.
And then other instruments are inserted also through small incisions, and they're controlled
from outside of the body. It's been called the da Vinci robot, but it's not actually
a robot at all. The biggest misconception, I think, is that people think it is a robot,
because they call it a da Vinci robot. So that implies that the machine can somehow do
things autonomously, which is not true. The instrument is always under the direct control
of the surgeon. The surgeon sits about five feet away from the patient and controls the
da Vinci through a console with joysticks that look and work like video game controllers
and are designed to prevent shaky hands during surgery. The surgeon views a 3D image of the
surgical site and controls four robotic arms with instruments that simulate a surgeon's
hand movements. Well, the view that you get is as though you're looking directly into
the abdomen, but with magnification. So there actually are a lot of small structures and
blood vessels that you can see very well with the da Vinci console that you couldn't see
if you were looking with the naked eye. I wanted to film the da Vinci in action, so
I contacted four hospitals and Syracuse that have a da Vinci, but none of the hospitals
would allow our camera crew inside their operating rooms. But I was able to find a da Vinci patient
who told me about her experience with the da Vinci. It was a very good experience. The
hospital was tremendous. The surgery was very easy. After more than three years of uterine
pain, so intense, she didn't want to leave her own home. She finally decided that a hysterectomy
was her best option. Three and a half years of being extremely sick every day and just
feeling like all I wanted to do was crawl back into bed every day. It was unbearable
and we had tried everything, different medications. There was just no getting out of doing the
hysterectomy. Doctors told Brogheisen if she went with da Vinci surgery, she would have
less pain and a shorter recovery time. They said five incisions instead of one large incision,
it was supposed to be two to four weeks out of work instead of six to eight weeks and
it was really I was really kind of excited about it. Brogheisen was back to work within
four weeks of surgery. Even after when I came back to work, everyone's like you have so
much color back and you look so much healthier and you look like you feel better and I'm
like I do. Once confined to her home because of the pain, Brogheisen is now living life
again. I'm doing more. I'm never home. I'm always out. I have a two and a half year old
goddaughter that before I just couldn't do anything with her and now I'm running around
with her and I absolutely love it. I have not felt this good in four years and it's
amazing how good you can feel. Vicki Brogheisen had her da Vinci surgery here at Community
General Hospital in Syracuse with a local surgeon right there in the operating room.
So if a surgeon can do an operation from five feet away from the patient, would it then
be possible to perform an operation from an entirely different city or country?
Well this was actually the original idea for the da Vinci was for military use actually
and the idea was that you could have you know injured soldiers close to the battlefield
with maybe physicians assistants or some type of general surgical personnel who could put
the instruments inside the patient and then you could have your array of surgical specialists
back at your medical center hundreds or thousands of miles away and have them actually do the
operation. Yeah if you can put the if you can put the console five feet away you could
put it 500 miles away and the problem with that and I don't think that that scenario
is likely to become a reality anytime soon is that if you have any kind of problem with
the patient if the surgeon is 500 miles away they can't just step over and take care of
it. Now what can go wrong? What if the machine breaks down? What happens then? Well it'd
be quite unlikely that the machine would actually break down. I don't know of any cases where
that's actually happened. There are instances where for technical reasons you can't complete
the surgery laparoscopically and in that case you always have the option and we always have
all the instruments available to actually make an incision and finish the surgery the
traditional way. A 2006 food and drug administration report shows just that. The da Vinci presented
a fault code to the user so the surgeon decided to convert the planned procedure to non robotic
surgical techniques. In 2002 a Florida man died two days after blood vessels were accidentally
cut during a surgery for kidney removal with the da Vinci. Shortly after the death St. Joseph's
Hospital in Tampa Florida called the incident a tragic isolated event. Intuitive surgical
the company that makes the da Vinci says the da Vinci system is designed to be fail safe
so in the event of technical failure the da Vinci is designed to shut down safely. Also
the da Vinci cannot be programmed nor can it make decisions on its own. The system requires
that every surgical maneuver be performed with direct input from the surgeon. Knowing
the possibility for human error I asked our doctor. Do you think robots in the traditional
sense will ever be able to perform surgeries autonomously? Not with what we have right
now. These are not instruments that are designed to do anything by themselves. These are instruments
that are totally human controlled. Even if we had that capability would patients like
Vicki Brokheisen really trust their lives to a robot? A computer doing surgery no you
would never see me doing that. Never? Never. I think I would probably die before I would
let a computer do my surgery by itself. Since a machine is only as effective as its operator
even as technology advances it appears that robots will never be able to replace humans
at least not in the operating room.
