robotic surgery, in medicine, the use of machines guided by doctors to perform surgical procedures. The word robot was first used in the play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, written by Czech novelist and playwright Karel Čapek and performed in 1921. The term originated from the Czech word for forced labour. Although able to relieve surgeons of some amount of repetitive labour, robotic surgery requires tremendous skill on the part of the surgeon. In addition, rather than being implemented specifically to reduce labour, robotic surgery is used primarily to allow operations to take place through minimally invasive incisions, to eliminate unwanted motion and improve surgical dexterity, and to allow remote surgery. Those applications have been viewed variously as compelling and controversial. In the early 21st century, even as scientists reported on the benefits of robotic surgery—which included decreased complication and mortality rates—others raised concerns about its high cost, flaws in robotic surgical equipment, and the underreporting of botched operations.

Historical developments

The concept of remote surgery, or telesurgery, was explored in the 1970s by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was interested in its application for astronauts in orbit. The basic idea was that a machine equipped with surgical instruments could be located on a space station and controlled by a surgeon on Earth. A similar plan was entertained by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA researchers worked to develop a remote telesurgery unit that would allow surgical procedures to be performed on the wounded in the battlefield. Although neither of those ideas was fully realized, advances in robotic telesurgical concepts and in telecommunication technologies enabled the 2001 Lindbergh Operation, in which French physician Jacques Marescaux and Canadian-born surgeon Michel Gagner performed a remote cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) from New York City on a patient in Strasbourg, France. Despite the breakthrough, telesurgery failed to gain widespread popularity for multiple reasons, including time delays between the control end and the operating end.

Another goal of robotic surgery was the elimination of unwanted motion. The first surgical robot, PUMA 560, was used in 1985 in a stereotaxic operation, in which computed tomography was used to guide the robot as it inserted a needle into the brain for biopsy, a procedure previously subject to error from hand tremors during needle placement. In 1988 PROBOT, developed at Imperial College London, was used to perform transurethral prostate surgery, a procedure that required numerous repetitive cutting motions. Also in 1992 ROBODOC, developed by the American companies Integrated Surgical Systems, Inc. (ISS), and IBM, was used to successfully prepare a cavity in the femur for hip replacement in human patients. It carried out the task more precisely and more quickly than human surgeons.

The 1980s and ’90s ushered in the era of laparoscopic surgery, in which a thin lighted optical instrument, similar to a small telescope, is used to examine abdominal and thoracic (chest) cavities. With the use of laparoscopes, surgeons found that they could perform operations through small incisions and decrease patients’ recovery time and hospital stays. The approach represented a type of minimally invasive surgery. Some surgeons sought to develop surgical robots that could aid in minimally invasive procedures. By the late 1990s three systems designed for minimally invasive surgery had been tested: the da Vinci Surgical System, developed by California-based Intuitive Surgical, Inc., and the AESOP and Zeus Robotic Surgical systems, both developed by Computer Motion, Inc., another California company. Many novel robotic surgeries were carried out by the Zeus system in the 1990s, including laparoscopic fallopian tube reanastomosis (reconnection of a cut fallopian tube) and laparoscopic cardiac revascularization in a closed-chest beating-heart operation (in which the chest was not surgically opened). Computer Motion was subsequently purchased by Intuitive Surgical, and the Zeus system was discontinued in 2003. As a result, the da Vinci Surgical System became the most widely used robotic surgical system worldwide.

The da Vinci consisted of a surgeon console, instruments that mimicked the human wrists, and a vision system. Technically it was a “slave” system, as the surgeon operated from the remote surgeon console where “master controllers” were manipulated to control the direct movements of the binocular camera and the wrist-mimicking instruments. The surgical instruments were attached to a cart positioned adjacent to the patient and were placed into the surgical field by the surgeon prior to initiating the procedure. The three-dimensional surgical view was re-created at a monitor that was hardwired to the surgical end, and computer processing linked the image and the spatial relationships of the instruments in a virtual surgical field visualized by the surgeon at the console. The advantage of the da Vinci system theoretically was that all three of the robotic surgical goals—remote console and surgeon, elimination of unwanted motion, and minimally invasive access—were accomplished. It was the elimination of unwanted tremor by the scaled movements of the robotic arms, the wristed motion that mimicked the movements of the human hand to allow dexterity in tight spaces, and the three-dimensional visualization with the binocular camera system that offered the greatest benefits.

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