DaVinci System saved my dad from prostate cancer. Robots may not be there for everything, but there’s applications that seem to be near perfect

Great point and for soft tissue work, Da Vinci is unparalleled. Unfortunately to make it so, it is nimble and agile and completely useless for the manual labor that defines orthopedics. It is a testament that if you design something well you often also define it / pigeon hole it. And in the case of orthopedics and spine, these tools aren’t up to the job.

I got to play with their bot at a local fair earlier this year. They manufacturer them not far off. They had a semi trailer set up and demoed the unit for the public in groups, then let us give it a go. Things got the most intuitive controls I've ever used. And it's setup so the doctor can just walk up and look through the eye peices and grab the controls but also disengage from it in a mere second to be physically back with the patient.

Da vinci does excellent hysterectomies too. Only 4 little 1 inch scars on the belly.

Yah I just had robot surgery. 1000÷ preferred over human surgery

The prostate it but da Vinci ally they will learn to accept it

Sorry, your notion that the robotic prostatectomy is better than a regular prostatectomy is about 15 years out-of-date.

Yes, they tried to make "function-sparing prostatectomy" the killer app for the insanely expensive operating robot. (And to be clear, the "function" we are talking about is potency, the man's ability to maintain an erection after surgery.) Maintaining potency is, of course, and admirable goal.

Problem is that maintaining potency also ended up maintaining the cancer cells. Yes, a higher percentage of "targeted resection" patients maintained their potency; but they also still had cancer.

The da Vinci is a dangerous, expensive cure in search of a disease. It makes bad surgeons even worse. Excellent surgeons rarely (if ever) need a gee-whiz marketing angle to prove to patients that they are up-to-date on all the expensive gizmos.

I want operating robots with some fucking horse power god dammit!

No doubt. As the inventor of the TrackX technology, I couldn’t agree with you more that to be effective the robot has to either add functionality that the human doesn’t have (tremor dampening as the Da Vinci does, or simultaneous multi-planer viewing as with TrackX) or take difficult tasks and make them simpler or quicker. Ideally it does all 3. Design is critical. As a rule, less is more and simplicity and resisting adding functionality make a better device. And making people acquire new skills rather than seamlessly merging into their historic workflow is a massive headwind to adoption. Totally agree that we can solve problems when the right engineer appreciates the problem and incorporates these rules of adoption.

The Manor problem isn't learning its speed

The robots are precise and delicate but they are very slow compared to a human.

Longer procedure times lead to worse outcomes.

Being medically ventilated and induced coma etc is really really bad for you

Wow they actually linked the study! https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2786671?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamasurg.2021.6339

Thanks for sharing this, this paper was an interesting read. That stat is only part of the story. Women were consistently less likely to die if the surgeon was female, and men were also more likely to die if the surgeon was male. Also, across the board, women were consistently less likely to die than men regardless of surgeon sex. That was surprising to me seeing how how medicine has largely ignored women's health for a long time. This seems to point either to a difference in treatment quality between men and women surgeons, or a difference in the risk level of surgeries performed by men and women surgeons. I'd be really interested to look more into the mechanism driving this disparity.

https://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/Abstract/2020/12150/Risk_of_Postoperative_Complications_and_Revision.20.aspx

The other study referenced is national data from insurance claims and vail I dated with another national study using the Medicare database. With thousands of patients and taking all comers it’s a bit difficult to refute, no?

I'd guess they use robotic surgeons all the time, but with human guidance. I think that's a lot of what happens under the cover of the bio bed.

Biobeds in Star Trek can perform simple surgeries by themselves (simple meaning still finer and more detailed than anything we can do today). On Star Trek they can create energy fields that feel as solid as matter. The biobeds can create such fields anywhere they want, meaning that any "simple", predefined surgery can be carried out automatically with extreme precision, often without breaking the skin.

Of course if it's a surgery that doesn't have exact, predefined instruction sets (which tends to be what happens when we the viewing audience are watching, for dramatic purposes), then it has to be carried out manually. Sometimes this is done by manually controlling the biobed (only seen a couple of times onscreen), but often the surgeons just use hand held tools with similar functionality, and just use the bed as an advanced fMRI to guide their decisions.