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Hand-Held Robot Operates On Man's Prostate

For the first time, a hand-held robot has been used to perform a operation on a man's prostate,


(Hand-Held Robot Operates On Man's Prostate)

It's the fusion of maintaining the feel and touch during an operation with the greater robotic articulation that makes it so special. The hospital says the robotic device allows surgeons to combine the touch and feel of traditional surgery with the greater accuracy and dexterity of articulating instruments. The device is more flexible than the human wrist and it is claimed allows more precise stitching, which aids post-operation recovery. The tip of the robot is able to move in many directions unlike more traditional rigid keyhole surgery instruments. "It's the fusion of maintaining the feel and touch during an operation with the greater robotic articulation that makes it so special. "This robot can do things not physically possibly with a human wrist and gives you the best of both worlds."

I was going to reference the robotic surgeon hand from Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story War Veteran, but then I remembered the remarkable microsurgery tool from Raymond Z. Gallun's 1939 short story Masson's Secret.

In his slender hands he held a surgical instrument he had invented. It was a marvel! There was a long steel arm or standard that could be clamped on the end of an operating table. At the end of the arm was a binocular microscope. Beneath the latter were hundreds of screw buttons. And gathered right where the microscope was focused - where a needle-point beam of intense light could be projected for illumination - there was a ring of tiny metal prongs. You turned the screws below and the prongs moved - any or all of them - in any plane or direction you could mention, and with caliper slowness, minuteness and precision. At the end of each prong was a surgical tool - blades, tweezers, probes - so fine you could just see them with the naked eye.

Micro-surgery!.. With an apparatus like that, it wasn't hard to believe that one could sort out and rejoin properly each of the countless, individual fibers of, say, a severed optic nerve.

Via Sky.

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