The Heart of Microsurgery

This article highlights an important milestone in medical history that was achieved when surgeons performed a delicate operation to repair a valve in a patient’s heart. During the procedure, the patient’s defective valve was trimmed and reconstructed. The operation was remarkable not because of what it accomplished—many thousands of patients have undergone heart-valve repair—but because of how it was done. During much of the complex procedure, the surgeon’s hands never entered or touched the patient’s body. Master-slave manipulators and telerobots are a special breed of robot-one in which the human is directly in the control loop commanding the robot’s actions. Telerobots are a modern version of master-slave manipulator technology, which has been used successfully in critical applications for more than four decades. The Intuitive system and others like it mark the beginning of a potentially huge wave of surgical applications for telerobots. With the assistance of surgical telerobots, surgeons will extend their healing skills to places within the body that are currently out of reach.