ROBODOC GETS PENTAGON CASH

For decades, telemed­i­cine guru and for­mer MASH sur­geon Dr. Richard Satava has been push­ing the Defense Department to fund sys­tems for remote and robotically-​​controlled oper­at­ing rooms. He’s not men­tioned in the AP arti­cle below. But you can see his fin­ger­prints all over this $12 mil­lion Darpa grant to “develop an unmanned ‘trauma pod’ designed to use robots to per­form full scalpel-​​and-​​stitch surg­eries on wounded sol­diers in bat­tle­field conditions.”

“The main chal­lenge is how can we get high-​​quality med­ical care onto the bat­tle­field as close to the action and as close to the sol­diers as pos­si­ble,” said John Bashkin, head of busi­ness devel­op­ment at SRI International, a non­profit lab­o­ra­tory that often han­dles Defense Department research. “Right now, the resources are pretty lim­ited to what a medic can carry with him.“
SRI researchers cau­tion that the project remains at least a decade away from appear­ing on any bat­tle­fields. Surgeons will need to manip­u­late the robot in real time, using tech­nol­ogy that pre­vents any delays between their com­mands and the robot’s actions. The “trauma pod” has to keep con­nected wire­lessly with­out giv­ing away its posi­tion to the enemy, and it has to be nim­ble and hardy enough to per­form under fire.
Still, some of the ini­tial tech­nol­ogy is already being put to use in hos­pi­tals, and the goal of the ini­tial $12 mil­lion project is rel­a­tively mod­est researchers hope to show that a sur­geon, oper­at­ing the robot remotely, can stitch together two blood ves­sels of a pig…
SRI spear­headed the Pentagon’s first such endeavor to develop a “telesurgery” sys­tem in the 1980s. The result­ing robot, dubbed the da Vinci Surgical System, proved to be too bulky and too depen­dent on too many humans to be used in bat­tle.
But the Food and Drug Administration approved the da Vinci in 2000 for civil­ian med­ical use and sur­geons now use the $1.3 mil­lion machines in about 300 hos­pi­tals world­wide to remove can­cer­ous prostates, repair faulty heart valves and other procedures.

Of course, this isn’t the only Darpa telesurgery pro­gram. Not by a long shot. A bunch of oth­ers are cov­ered here.
A few months back, I wrote about an unmanned ambu­lance exper­i­ment that’s being funded by the Army. And here is an arti­cle I wrote back in ’03 about Dr. Satava’s efforts to dig­i­tally recre­ate every ele­ment of a soldier’s body, and embed it all on a chip in the soldier’s dog tags.

March 28th, 2005 | Medic! | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.