14 DAY TRIAL // Who ever thought robots would come to surpass human precision and intelligence in quite a few years from this point on was bitterly wrong.
It is a known fact - robots are going to replace doctors soon enough. The proof for this lies in a Milanese hospital where a 34 year old man, who had been suffering from atrial fibrillation, the so called "heart flutters", was the first human patient ever operated on by a robot surgeon.
The astonishing experiment of the first human ever to be operated by a robot has also another feature for which it should deserve all acclaim - this heart surgery was the first of its kind, being initialized from far away.
The 50 minute operation was initialized and monitored on a computer by Carlo Pappone, chief of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at San Raffaele University in Milan, who was in Boston at the time, while the robot surgeon was in Italy. The surgery was also attended by many heart specialists and doctors who were attending an international conference on arrhythmia in Boston.
Pappone stated that this kind of robotic surgery represents the new medical frontier that has been crossed today and that this should represent the future of medicine. The Italian has performed no less than 40 previous surgeries before, and some of them are featured in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. "It has learned to do the job thanks to experience gathered from operations on 10,000 patients. The robot can now recognize the type of patient and the required method of operating," Pappone added.
The robot will be on sale starting later this month.