14 DAY TRIAL // The New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton, UK, has recently achieved a country first: they used robotic technology to perform heart surgery and have significantly reduced the recovering time for their patients.
These procedures have been carried out at the hospital’s Heart and Lung Center, and the robotic technology employed by these surgeons basically consists of four robot arms, which can be controlled by specialists with maximum accuracy.
Therefore, the surgeons who have performed these procedures wish to emphasize the fact that, although highly efficient and helpful, the Da Vinci robotic technology must not be given all the credit for the success of these operations.
"It should be pointed out that the machine is an instrument and doesn’t have any autonomy – all movements are directly and precisely controlled," surgeon Stephen Billing explained.
However, the fact remains that, when used correctly, this technology can significantly reduce the recovery time for patients.
More precisely, the recovery time for a 43-year-old patient was reduced from roughly six months to just six to eight weeks.
As Express and Star explains, this is because the Da Vinci only performs very small incisions which allow its robot arms to access the heart without the surgeons' having to cut through the breastbone.
According to the same source, a small camera is what allows the surgeons to have a look inside the patient's thoracic cavity.
"The goal in surgery is always to make it less invasive but as soon as you make an incision smaller you don’t get as a good a view of what you’re doing and the range of instruments you can used is reduced."
"The robotic system takes away those problems. The camera gives us a fantastic, magnified, 3D, high definition view of the heart which we wouldn’t get any other way," specialist Moninder Bhabra told members of the press.
The Da Vinci robotic technology has been used by surgeons in the US for quite some time now, but on continental Europe it is only employed by two hospitals in Finland and Sweden.