Surgeon's Assistant Is A Robot

The use of robotics in the operating room is no longer a notion for science fiction. Doctors are starting to use robots, and patients are the beneficiaries. Dr. Emily Senay reports in the CBS News This Morning series, "Heartscore 99," that looks at the fight against heart disease and what the future holds.

A new assistant to heart surgeons might take much of the pain out of the operation.

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At Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania, doctors are performing a typical heart bypass surgery, with one notable exception. The chief cardiothorasic surgeon is sitting about seven feet away from the patient.

While what Dr. Ralph Damiano is using may look more like a video game, it's actually allowing him to perform surgery with two robotic arms that mimic his moves, and a third arm to act as his eyes.

"I really think that computer-assisted and robotically-assisted surgery are not only going to let surgeons do the procedures we're doing today better, and with much less patient discomfort, but I think there may be whole new operations that we're able to do, only limited by our imagination," Dr. Damiano says.

Back in December, Elsie Leffler suffered a heart attack, and was told she needed surgery. "The way he described it, if I had another one I might not make it. So that was scary enough," she recalls.

Leffler became the first American to be operated on by a robot. "When you think of a robot, it does sound like something out of science fiction, but it's great," she says.

By using a robot, surgeons hope eventually to make heart surgery less invasive.

In current surgeries, doctors have to make a cut the length of the patient's chest, and then open the rib cage. In robotic surgery, longer tools are inserted through three incisions, each only the width of a pencil.

Only the rock steady hand of a robot could handle these longer tools. "We've been interested over the last several years in trying to make cardiac surgery less and less invasive," Damiano notes. "I think surgeons do have very steady hands. But really as you get these very long instruments, no one can hold them that steady."

Dr. Damiano says it could cut a patient's stay in the hospital from four to five days to one or two. And while it won't save more lives than today's surgeries, it will hopefully shorten recovery time.

"I think we owe it to our patients to try to develop opeations that result in as little trauma as possible, and that's really what our motivation for all this work has been," he says.

For Elsie Leffler, being a part of the future was her motivation. "So many in the family had heart problems. Maybe one day my children might need it," she says.

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