Robotic Surgery Systems Developed for All US-based Medical Labs

For the first time ever, a set of seven robotic surgery systems has been developed which can be used by all major medical research labs in the United States, according to a story by Diksha P. Gupta.

The systems were designed by robotics experts at the University of California and the University of Washington. Gupta reports, that after final testing, five of the systems will be shipped to the Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley and UCLA while the remaining two systems will be retained at UC Santa Cruz and UW. All this will be done after a final round of tests.  

The experts decided to choose an open source model “because it will enable the field to advance more quickly if all the labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery,” Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project, told Gupta.

Robotic surgery has become increasingly the procedure of choice for many surgeons in many specialties, from performing prostate cancer surgeries, to hysterectomies,  to inserting breathing tubes.

It’s become so popular because it’s less invasive, quicker, usually doesn’t require overnight hospital stays, and recovery time is just about cut in half. Gupta reports that it’s particularly useful for telesurgery, “where the surgeon can operate a robotic system from a remote location,” to offer better access to expert care in remotely located areas and in developing nations.

The truly exciting part of this, Gupta writes, is that “this kind of network of laboratories that work on a common platform enables the researchers to replicate experiments, share software and collaborate in several other fruitful ways.”

In the past, labs worked with proprietary software, limiting their ability to interact with other labs. “"Academic researchers have had limited access to these proprietary systems,” Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project, told Gupta. “We are changing that by providing high-quality hardware developed within academia. Each lab will start with an identical, fully-operational system, but they can change the hardware and software and share new developments and algorithms, while retaining intellectual property rights for their own innovations."

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