by helios » Sat Aug 22, 2009 10:56 am
Whenever i hear of the word 'disruptive technology', i thought of Surgical Robots and how they can continue to change the future of surgery ...
2 weeks ago, i gave a presentation on how our robots are important to our economic and manufacturing landscape ...
2 days ago, i was at one of the local hospital operation threatre - witnessing how our miniturised Robot can assist the surgeons to perform the [minimally invasive surgical] prostate biopsy procedure. Traditionally, a prostate biopsy is not the safest or best way to diagnose for prostate cancer (size of the prostate was so fragile and small? could have bleeding complications if the surgeon is not careful?) ... However, this time, it was a "WOW" factor to be in the OT procedure; we literally saw the surgeon was actually the 'robot' performing the 24 needles aspirations like a click using the robot-guided transrectal ultrasound imaging (without using much of a guesswork); within 12 minutes, the biopsy was done!! ...
last evening, i was at the hospital again; we sat down with the engineers and clinician to 'thrash' out how our next robot to perform colon-rectal scanning could be improvised much further ... i'm looking forward for our first few clinical trial cases using the improvised prototype ...
here is a picture of the bench-marked robot, da Vinci Surgical System; Singapore has 2 of these i think in National Heart Centre (see Straits Times on Thursday); each system costs USD 1.5 Million ...
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