Racing to the future

March 21, 2008

While sitting on a plane yesterday waiting out a rain delay in Newark I was reading the airline magazine and saw a full-page ad for the Center for Advanced Surgery and Technology at Trinity-Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas. What Mother Frances was advertising was the technology it has to perform minimally invasive robotic surgery. They touted their three da Vinci robots and the ability to train other surgeons on the specific techniques involved in these robotic surgical procedures.

Just as I continue to be amazed at how a 200-ton 747 aircraft can fly so gracefully, I am now amazed at how far and how fast surgical technologies have come in the past 25 years. Lasik eye surgery was developed in 1987 and by 2000, there were more than a million procedures performed in the U.S. Nearly 500,000 total knee replacements were performed last year and nearly 250,000 hips were replaced, up nearly 100% in less than 10 years. And equally large numbers of micro-surgical procedures for cleaning up and repairing human and animal joints are performed daily, each minimizing the trauma of the invasive procedure. My knee surgery more than 25 years ago was not the minimally invasive type and it required three days in the hospital—today that same procedure would be treated as an outpatient.

So now robotic surgery for cardiac, prostate, and other internal organs is starting to be used in larger numbers—it’s not what I would call commonplace yet, but it will within an all too short a span of time. Less than 10 years ago, I wrote a cover story for R&D on these robotic surgical technologies and I remember writing about the first three procedures performed that year. For those Star Trek fans who recall Dr. McCoy’s handheld medical analyzer, I really believe that we’re not going to have to wait until the 23rd century to realize those devices’ capabilities—much of it is likely to be developed in the 21st century.

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