Sci-fi surgery
Utilizing a technology new to Children's Hospital Boston, surgeons used to looking through a camera to perform certain surgical procedures can now see their patients in three dimensions while performing complicated procedures more safely and effectively.
Last March, urologic surgeons Craig Peters, MD, and Joseph Borer, MD, became the first Children's surgeons to use the new "tele-robotic" surgical unit, an operating system controlled via a console in the operating room.
The mobile system is the only one like it at a pediatric medical center in the country. Its instruments mimic the wrist motion of a human hand, and allow surgeons to perform more precise and complex reconstructive surgery inside the abdomen, chest and other body cavities without requiring a large incision.
Pedro del Nido, MD, associate chief of Cardiovascular Surgery, helped bring the system to Children's and uses it for heart procedures like closing fetal blood vessels that don't close after birth (known as ligation of a patent ductus). He says the minimally invasive surgery unit has many advantages. "We can avoid cutting through bones or opening the chest or abdomen," he says. "And the incision is tiny compared to open chest surgery, which for the child means less pain and scarring."
Long-term plans include using the system to assist in intracardiac "beating heart" surgeries without the use of cardiopulmonary bypass. "This technology could change the way we do surgery," says del Nido. "Many procedures will become dramatically safer and less expensive, and patients will recover more quickly."
To support robotic surgery at Children's Hospital Boston, contact Julie Considine in the Children's Hospital Trust at (617) 355-6193 or julie.considine@chtrust.org.
