Advantages of Robotic Surgery

In today's operating rooms, you'll find two or three surgeons, an anesthesiologist and several nurses, all needed for even the simplest of surgeries. Most surgeries require nearly a dozen people in the room. As with all automation, surgical robots will eventually eliminate the need for some of that personnel. Taking a glimpse into the future, surgery may require only one surgeon, an anesthesiologist and one or two nurses. In this nearly empty operating room, the doctor will sit at a computer console, either in or outside the operating room, using the surgical robot to accomplish what it once took a crowd of people to perform.

The use of a computer console to perform operations from a distance opens up the idea of tele-surgery, which would involve a doctor performing delicate surgery miles away from the patient. If the doctor doesn't have to stand over the patient to perform the surgery, and can remotely control the robotic arms at a computer station a few feet from the patient, the next step would be performing surgery from locations that are even farther away. If it were possible to use the computer console to move the robotic arms in real-time, then it would be possible for a doctor in California to operate on a patient in New York. A major obstacle in tele-surgery has been the time delay between the doctor moving his or her hands to the robotic arms responding to those movements. Currently, the doctor must be in the room with the patient for robotic systems to react instantly to the doctor's hand movements.

Having fewer personnel in the operating room and allowing doctors the ability to operate on a patient long-distance could lower the cost of health care. In addition to cost efficiency, robotic surgery has several other advantages over conventional surgery, including enhanced precision and reduced trauma to the patient. For instance, heart bypass surgery now requires that the patient's chest be "cracked" open by way of a 1-foot (30.48-cm) long incision. However, with the da Vinci or ZEUS systems, it is possible to operate on the heart by making three small incisions in the chest, each only about 1 centimeter in diameter. Because the surgeon would make these smaller incisions instead of one long one down the length of the chest, the patient would experience less pain and less bleeding, which means a faster recovery.

Robotics also decrease the fatigue that doctors experience during surgeries that can last several hours. Surgeons can become exhausted during those long surgeries, and can experience hand tremors as a result. Even the steadiest of human hands cannot match those of a surgical robot. The da Vinci system has been programmed to compensate for tremors, so if the doctor's hand shakes the computer ignores it and keeps the mechanical arm steady.

While surgical robots offer some advantages over the human hand, we are still a long way from the day when autonomous robots will operate on people without human interaction. But, with advances in computer power and artificial intelligence, it could be that in this century a robot will be designed that can locate abnormalities in the human body, analyze them and operate to correct those abnormalities without any human guidance.

Your heart is the engine inside your body that keeps everything running. Basically, the heart is a muscular pump that maintains oxygen and blood circulation through your lungs and body. In a day, your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood. Like any engine, if the heart is not well taken care of it can break down and pump less efficiently, a condition called heart failure.

Until recently, the only option for many severe heart failure patients has been heart transplants. However, there are only slightly more than 2,000 heart transplants performed in the United States annually, meaning that tens of thousands of people die waiting for a donor heart. On July 2, 2001, heart failure patients were given new hope as surgeons at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, performed the first artificial heart transplant in nearly two decades. The AbioCor Implantable Replacement Heart is the first completely self-contained artificial heart and is expected to at least double the life expectancy of heart patients.

In this article, you will get an in-depth look at how this new artificial heart works, how it's implanted into a patient's chest and who might be a candidate for receiving one of these mechanical hearts. We will also compare the AbioCor heart to the artificial hearts that have failed in the past.

Signal Transduction — Targeting Cancer at the Molecular Level

New understanding of how cancer cells survive, thrive, and metastasize has enabled researchers to create new targeted therapies for cancer treatments, such as melanoma and Kaposi's sarcoma, to minimize the harmful systemic effects of therapy on healthy cells. The specific and selective targets of future oncology drugs will require a detailed understanding of cancer cell biology, genetics, immunology, and biotechnology.

The search for anti-cancer therapies which target cancer cells specifically and selectively with less toxicity has been a quest in oncology for many years. Conventional chemotherapeutic agents do not target cancer cells selectively, leading to widespread adverse systemic effects. Chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and biological agents all target cells that are in the process of proliferation. Therefore, both cancer cells and mitotically active healthy cells are subject to the cytotoxic effects of these therapies.

New understanding of how cancer cells survive, thrive, and metastasize has enabled researchers to create new targeted therapies for cancer treatments to minimize the harmful systemic effects of therapy on healthy cells. Cancer therapies are now in development which block or interrupt specific pathways or proteins that are intricately involved in the proliferation of cancer cells. Molecular targeting of cancer cells is the prevailing research field in oncologic pharmacology. The discovery of distinctive molecular pathways of cancer has engendered new targets for oncology pharmacotherapy. The specific and selective targets of future oncology drugs will require a detailed understanding of cancer cell biology, genetics, immunology, and biotechnology.

There are treatments for all patients with an adult brain tumor. Three kinds of treatment are used: surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy

Radiation therapy uses x-rays produced by a machine called a linear accelerator or a cobalt machine to kill cancer cells from the outside and shrink tumors (external-beam radiation therapy). Radiation therapy may also be used by putting materials that produce radiation (radioisotopes) through thin plastic tubes into the tumor to kill cancer cells from the inside (internal radiation therapy).

Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells. Chemotherapy may be taken by pill, or it may be put into the body by a needle in the vein or muscle. Chemotherapy is called a systemic treatment because the drug enters the bloodstream, travels through the body, and can kill cancer cells throughout the body.

Biological therapy (using the body's immune system to fight cancer) is also being studied in clinical trials. Biological therapy tries to get the body to fight cancer. It uses materials made by the body or made in a laboratory to boost, direct, or restore the body's natural defenses against disease. Biological therapy is sometimes called biological response modifier therapy or immunotherapy.

Treatment of adult brain tumor depends on the type and stage of the disease, and the patient's age and overall health. Standard treatment may be considered because of its effectiveness in past studies, or participation in a clinical trial may be considered. Not all patients are cured with standard therapy, and some standard treatments may have more side effects than are desired. For these reasons, clinical trials are designed to find better ways to treat cancer patients and are based on the most up-to-date information. Clinical trials are ongoing in most parts of the country for most types of adult brain tumor.