The Surgery Itself and a Tour of the Training Facility

The computer-controlled equipment that makes this minimally-invasive surgery possible is called the da Vinci Surgical System® designed by Intuitive Surgical, Inc. The robotic arms actually resemble hunting arrows – think bow-and-arrows. They're less than 3/8" in diameter sort of like one of those big thick pencils they used to give you to mark your SAT test answers or ballots back before somebody decided a hole puncher or $500 PDA would be better than a 25¢ piece of ScanTron paper. Fantastic Voyage They have special tools at the end rather than the pierce point of an arrow.

If you can imagine, the robot arms slip in your side between the ribs and are maneuvered over until they can reach what is needed at the heart, so they may stick in you 12" or so. Browse through the site to see the equipment. The instrument at the end replicates motions on the surgeon's hand. This appears to take time to learn, but in the hands of a well-trained expert, it looks like a person's real hands are performing these motions directly on the tissue, sutures, and instruments. I saw it and it was amazing.

They can show this up on a projection screen for a team of interested surgeons to observe. They can watch the monitoring equipment and the room overall.

This is all digitally captured and stored on hard drives, or can even be beamed around the world on the network. These guys have not shied away from high-tech! To tour the training facility and talk to the folks that ran it ultimately gave me great confidence that indeed I had selected the best surgeon to perform my surgery, especially on this advanced equipment.

Interestingly, the origins of this robotic surgery are in the military. The military was interested in being able to remotely operate on wounded soldiers. Consider the possibilities if they could operate on the soldier almost in the field or maybe in a more sterile environment, but the doctor could be in a distant, safe, or even convenient location.

What’s the difference if the surgeon was even thousands of miles away? Well, maybe you wouldn’t want your heart worked on with the surgeon’s motions being transmitted across the Internet, but you can imagine some interesting possibilities if some kinks were worked out. Apparently those sorts of dreams are what spurred people on to develop these amazing robotic surgical tools.

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The Operating Theatre

A tour of the training facility was very interesting. This is where Dr. Chitwood's team at East Carolina University's Brody School of Medicine train other surgeons to use the da Vinci robot for mitral valve surgery. http://chsc.med.ecu.edu/mitral

They showed us my very surgery on a projection screen. Very cool. It was fascinating to watch and to see the deft and dexterity of Dr. Chitwood when using the tools. After a couple minutes you realized that these were miniature robot hands not human hands performing these feats yet they were being skillfully manipulated and seemed to perfectly mimic the motion and fluidity of a human. Watching him tie knots in sutures made you really appreciate his skill and experience.

They were supposed to send me some excerpts from the surgery, but never did – a big disappointment. I'm thinking some lawyer spooked them. If you're wondering what your heart valve looks like, I'll twist a popular phrase by saying "it looks like chicken".

The University uses this special facility to train other surgeons. It is in a separate building from the operating theatre but is connected by fiber optic cable and they can monitor all aspects of a surgery from across the street, live, with broadcast-quality video. They capture the 3-dimensional video from the camera in your body that the surgeon is using to see his work.