What is considered robotic surgery?

What is considered robotic surgery?

Surgery underway at the Red Cross Hospital in TampereFinland during the 1918 Finnish Civil War.

Robotic surgery is a type of minimally invasive surgery. Moreover, during which doctors use very small surgical instruments that fit into a patient’s body through a series of tiny incisions.

However, is it really “robotic surgery” or a misplaced definition?

Hieronymus FabriciusOperationes chirurgicae, 1685

Many surgeons believe there is no truly robotic surgery. 

What some refer to as robotic surgery becomes computer-controlled devices. Moreover, to reach where fingers have trouble going, controlled by surgeons using magnification, with fiber optic or radiographic visualization. 

Furthermore, in all the systems we know, the surgeon is controlling the devices in real time. In addition, whether the surgeon is at the incision, elsewhere in the operating room, or even at another location.  

We do not know of any system programmed to perform surgery by itself.

An operation in 1753, painted by Gaspare Traversi.

Many systems advise the surgeon. 

For instance, when performing knee replacements. The surgeon receives advice with a green light. When his bone resection was correct. According to the computer program’s correlation of the knee with the pre-op computerized tomography of the knee. 

If his resection was nearing completion, a red light flashed. 

Lastly, if the system thought he might make a poor cut, a loud alarm sounded, this system, called the Maki, which has been very successful, but is in no way autonomous, so it is a misnomer to call it robotic surgery.

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Frank Wilczek

What is considered robotic surgery?