Robotic Surgery On a Beating Heart

An anonymous reader writes "Serious heart surgery usually involves stopping the organ and keeping the patient alive with a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. But this risks brain damage and requires a long recuperation. Scientists at Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston have now developed a device that lets surgeons operate on a beating heart with a steady hand. The 'robotic' device uses 3-D ultrasound images to predict and compensate for the motion of the heart so that the surgeon can work on a faulty valve as it moves. The approach should improve recovery times and give a surgeon instant feedback on the success of the procedure, the researchers say. Here's a (slightly gory) video of the device in action."

NOW they tell me!

[dazedNconfuzed (154242)]

I had valve replacement surgery two months ago. While everything went extremely well (thank you Emory hospital), my wife would have appreciated not hearing the words "it's going well, they're stopping his heart now...".

Re:NOW they tell me!

[theaveng (1243528)]

Pretty soon they'll just use robots (nanites) and won't need a surgeon at all, except to act as a kind of "general" giving orders to the tiny machines.

Poe

[dasheiff (261577)]

Edgar Allan Poe would be proud.

What if something goes wrong?

[WarJolt (990309)]

The software can predict where heart tissue will be approximately 70 to 100 milliseconds in the future, so the position of the tip of the handheld surgical tool can be adjusted accordingly.

In surgery there is always a potential for something to go wrong. Can the software compensate for cardiac arrhythmias which are inherently unpredictable?

Surgeons typically respond better than machines to unpredicted circumstances.

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor (1089561)]

...Surgeons typically respond better than machines to unpredicted circumstances.

True, and a good point.

I wonder what the probability is of an event occurring which would require the flexible, though less precise, ability of the Surgeon versus the increased success afforded by the inflexible, but precise, machines.

in other words, statistically speaking, does the risk of unpredictable events outweigh the benefit of increased quality of operation.

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[Ethanol-fueled (1125189)]

To add to your point, it's not just the increased precision, it's also about not having to rip other stuff open which increases the risk of complication.

Operations which required 6-inch incisions(think hernias and appendectomies) can be done with half-inch incisions thanks to technology. I'd gladly be touched by a robot as long as it left less of a mess on the way out. Plus, there's less of a risk of the doc leaving instruments inside when he sews you up. It happens, so don't laugh :)

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[eln (21727)]

I'd gladly be touched by a robot as long as it left less of a mess on the way out.

Pervert.

Re:

[WarJolt (990309)]

Though machines are more precise, we would need someone to blame if something went wrong. How could you tell someone that your son, daughter or husband would of lived if it was a surgeons hands instead of a machine.
Airplanes can fly and land more precisely always on autopilot. All the human carrying ones still have pilots behind on-board because we still need someone to blame in case it crashes. We need a soul in control of the machine that has control over our lives. It's just too freaky not to. It may mak

Re:

[AngryUndead (733008)]

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/1882971/ [airliners.net]

Basically, airplanes can land just fine by themselves. It is vital that they are able to do so in no visibility situations.

Re:

[fractoid (1076465)]

I wonder what the probability is of an event occurring which would require the flexible, though less precise, ability of the Surgeon versus the increased success afforded by the inflexible, but precise, machines.

It sounds to me like in this situation, the machine is more flexible than the surgeon.

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[Gat0r30y (957941)]

It would also seem to me that an arrhythmia would be much more likely to occur during such a procedure, since the heart (and generally the whole body) of the patient is under a significantly higher amount of stress during open heart surgery. But I guess the real answer would lie in the control system designed to predict the future behavior of the organ. Does it use a regular heartbeat to predict future behavior? Or, much more likely in my view, does the software use the ultrasound to predict future behavior independent of any particular "regular" heartbeat? I can say that if I were designing such a control system I would not want a set "regular" heartbeat as an expectation, I would much rather use the ultrasound to feed forward information from each chamber independently, so that even if there were an arrhythmia the compensation would not be directly effected.

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[The Gaytriot (1254048)]

I'd say that's the point of the ultrasound. Otherwise, if the robot simply attempted to predict the position of the heart by it's rhythm alone there would be serious issues.

Using the ultrasound, which updates the position to a computer (probably updating around 4-5 MHz), means that the robot can compensate for the position close enough to real time that it can avoid mistakes (there is still the tiny delay).

Any irregularities due to Arrhythmia should not be an issue, the heart will probably not change beating faster than the computer and robot can compensate.

Re:

[Yvanhoe (564877)]

From what I read, see, infer, I doubt that the prediction happens at the scale of a heartbeat. I think it is more something like a prediction with a 1 ms measure step. A sequence of position, a simple physical system to tune an extrapolation filter should be enough to anticipate any kind of abnormal behavior of the heart. The model may be accurate at 70/100 ms but obviously the tool in the video is moving faster than that. The interest of the machine is not to predict where the tissue will be in 100 ms but

Re:What if something goes wrong?

[Trifthen (40989)]

I was wondering about that myself. My open-heart surgery in 1984 obviously used the old method of hypothermia to stop the heart, and as expected, required several hours to install a dacron patch to close a ventricular septal defect, close an atrial septal defect, widen my pulmonary artery, and surgically separate my tricuspid and mitral valves... and that was just what they could fix back then. That's a ton of crap, and I have to wonder how effectively a robot could work on a beating heart while having it open and basically re-arranging the entire inside.

Then again, this seems obviously aimed at things like bypass surgery. I still have to wonder how invasive this technology can get before it gets too risky.

Re:

[fractoid (1076465)]

I've never understood this - people are perfectly happy to accept "human error" or "mechanical failure" as inevitable, but the moment there's a remote chance of a computer screwup they're terrified, even if it's far less likely to happen than either of the others.

Maybe it's because in the case of human error, the human who made the error probably died in the crash...

OOOHH NOES!!!!

[by Anonymous Coward]

NOW THEY'RE DISSECTING US!

I Am Sure Glad They Provided Video!

[BigAssRat (724675)]

Otherwise I would have had NO idea what this thing does!! Am I the only one that got 2 seconds of what looks like a hypodermic and a back massager?

Sat in on one once...

[angrytuna (599871)]

I was able to sit in on an open heart surgery at one point in my life. After the surgeon cracked the chest open, he inserted a surgical glove full of (I think) normal saline, tied off at the wrist. Called it a 'helping hand'. The heart continued to beat merrily away on top of it, and they used a device called an octopus [medgadget.com] to hold the pertinent section of the heart still.

To date, remains one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

Robot vs. Reboot

[thewiz (24994)]

I, for one, would be happy to have a robot operate on me if I ever have a fourth open-heart surgery. The three surgeries I've had required that I be attached to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, have my heart stopped by electric shock, sternum cut and rib cage spread open, and be restarted by another electric shock when they were done.

Trust me, hot-swap is much better than a cold reboot!

Human surgeons are buggy too

[by Anonymous Coward]

What are the repercussions if your human surgeon has a transient ischemic attack during surgery?

Re:But...

[Babbster (107076)]

All cliches aside, what are the repercussions if this thing BSODs (or equivalent) during surgery?

Probably minimal. Even with total failure, the solution would be to pull the needle and switch to a standard valve replacement surgery. Once that happens, anything done by the machine can be reversed and damage repaired, if necessary. Of course, something more terrible could happen (I'll save the descriptions for a horror screenplay) but the more catastrophic potential complications are far more likely to be operator error than a problem with the software of the device.

Re:

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

It was compensating for the heart beat, which means that if it just stopped it would nick the heart unless it was already at the maximum distance from the heart. I wonder if there could be a hardware failsafe where losing power or direction from the software would make it pull back an inch from the heart.

Even with the risks of a BSOD, though, it's a much better alternative than being put on a bypass machine and having human hands in there. With properly built hardware and software, the failure rate shou

Re:

[evanbd (210358)]

I'd probably rather have this thing working on me than the normal procedure -- bypass is definitely something I'd rather avoid. But, if this thing manages to make a large mistake and tear something, that might be a *big* problem. Note that software has certainly cause medical problems before -- see the Therac-25 [wikipedia.org] for example. It's rare, but software mistakes can and do happen. Caution is obviously warranted, but this probably represents a vast improvement on the current state of the art.

Re:But...

[Godji (957148)]

Your question contains the answer. What would happen is a blue screen of, you know, death.

Seriously though, even if the software were written to be somehow provably correct, hardware can always fail. So can the surgeon.

Re:But...

[moogied (1175879)]

...the repercussions are a more literal translation of BSOD then we generally want..