造价昂贵,但非常精神的外科手术机器人--------达芬奇(英语)- -
造价昂贵,但非常精神的外科手术机器人--------达芬奇
by chinarobot
chinarobot -- The patient was stretched along a table for his prostate surgery, and only his rounded belly could be seen poking through the sheets. A team of assistants stood by checking vital signs.
But the operating doctor never touched the 54-year-old man. Instead, da Vinci, a $1 million robot wielding sharp, slender tools, went inside his abdomen. Cuts were more precise because its limbs were steady and could move in angles that are impossible for doctors.
"We couldn't do it with just our hands," Dr. Michael Fabrizio of Devine-Tidewater Urology said after performing the surgery at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
Da Vinci recently replaced another surgical robot called Zeus, which the hospital first began using in April 2003. Da Vinci has more magnification powers and mobility than Zeus. Besides in prostate surgery, da Vinci has assisted doctors at other hospitals in kidney and cardiac surgery.
For the prostate surgery, Fabrizio controlled the four-armed device from a console across the room. He squeezed handles that made the robots fingers snip, stop bleeding and sew incisions inside the patient while he watched the three-dimensional images on a monitor.
With a tiny video camera, or endoscope, the doctor can zoom in and out and maneuver in a full circle. The robot magnifies images as much as 12 times, making a golf ball-sized prostate appear nearly the size of the monitor.
With open surgery, an 8-inch incision could run from the pelvis to the belly button. But with the robot, doctors make a few tiny holes and insert the robot's instruments.
Healing time is reduced from about four weeks to about two weeks, Fabrizio said. There's less blood loss, patients don't have to stay on a catheter as long, and it's possible that men could better maintain their sexual potency, because the robot is capable of sparing more nerves than with older methods.
Fabrizio said some hospitals are charging as much as $18,000 extra that patients have to pay out of pocket for the use of the robot. Since July, he said, doctors have used the da Vinci robot to perform about 20 prostate surgeries at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
Patients who have had prostate cancer and who are expected to live at least 10 more years are likely candidates for the surgery, which is often covered by insurance.
Doctors must go through 16 hours of practice surgery on dogs, pigs or cadavers before they can begin using da Vinci on patients, said spokeswoman Mollie Patterson, from Intuitive Surgical, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company that produces the robots. Then, in their own hospitals, doctors conduct their first surgeries working with a supervising surgeon.
Other Virginia hospitals that use da Vinci include the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, and the Henrico Doctors' Hospital and the CJW Medical Center in Richmond.