A 8.1 magnitude quake rocks the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge partially collapses, taking some cars returning to the east bay after a night at the bars into the waters below. The new Oakland span, finished less than a year before, weathers the quake with only minor structural damage. The buildings in San Francisco don’t fair as well.
For Harrison Thomas, the only thing he remembered was that the walls were shaking right before the floor of his apartment suddenly disappeared.
Responders on the scene did a quick survey of the scene and deploy snake-like robots to search for survivors. After twelve minutes Harrison Thomas is found wedged between the flooring of the second and third floor. A piece of wood has speared his leg, pinning him in place.
The crew at the scene uses the robots diamond-edged belt saw to carefully saw their way through the wood in order to aid in his removal. A doctor from St. Louis, on call since the disaster, views the proceedings from his local hospital. Seeing Harrison’s body, he determines that a surgery must be made before the rescue crews get to him in order to save his leg.
Morphine is injected into his leg in preparation for the surgery. UV sterilized tools, located inside the snake, are manipulated over a secure wireless connection to repair the neural and vascular damage done to his leg. Hours later, crews finally unearth Harrison and take him to a mobile hospital set up in a warehouse at Pier 5.
Without this technology, he would have lost his leg, possibly even died.
Now, I’m no brain surgeon, but I have followed the progress that
Intuitive Surgical has been making in the
field of robotic-assisted prostectomies, and it might interest you
to know that in 2005 the company was performing less 1% of all
prostectomies. Today, it is performing over 50%!
The reason this is occurring is because the da Vinci robot (which is still
controlled by a surgeon using a computer) is so precise that the
surgery is only minimally invasive, and this allows the patient to
leave the hospital in one to two days. Patients who have a
traditional operation must stay five to seven days. Of course, this
extra stay costs hospitals a great deal of money and they now have
a vested interest in switching patients over to the robotic-asisted
surgery. Not surprisingly, convincing patients to undergo a
robotic-assisted operation has been made easier because they are
not only told the scar will be much smaller but they will also get
out of the hospital much sooner.
The NeuroArm and similar neurosurgical robots are the wave of
the future. They may not be performing many operations today, but
my guess is that just as Intuitive Surgical’s Da Vinci robots now
control the prostectomy market, neurosurgical robots will contol
the brain surgery market in 5 to 10 years.
If you are so inclined, I recommend the following 10-minute
video from Wired Science which shows how the da Vinci robot is now
beginning to assist with heart surgery: (cont.)
In the future patients with tumors and lesions will be able to
walk into a doctor’s office, sit down in a chair, have the anomaly
zapped non-invasively by an array of radiation beams that converge
at a single point inside their body, chat with the doctors the
whole way through, then get up, say thank you and drive themselves
home.
If that sounds amazing to you then you’ll be even more surprised
to discover that this hi-tech treatment already exists and has been
occurring for several months already.
Since its Fall 2007 release, a virtual surgery platform called
CyberKnife
that combines embedded tumor sensing, 3D imaging and concentrated
radiation bursts has been gaining considerable popularity. Surgeons
all over the globe have been reporting great success with the
device which makes it much easier to target certain areas of the
lungs and brain.
Check out this short MedWatch segment to see for yourself:
To get a sense of how the radiation beams work together, take a
look at this promotional video by the manufacturer:
