My background is writing partially thought-out gadget blog posts, so you’ll forgive me this brief moment of juvenile amazement:Holy cow surgeons have the craziest tools! Is the SPIDER something you surgeons out there are regularly playing god with, or what?
Promising instrument triangulation and flexible, articulating instruments via a 2×2 system of flexible and rigid access ports, the Spider looks, to my untrained eye, to be quite the advancement on the scalpel, which I had previously thought was all surgeons needed to carve people up and remove appendices and such. Ignorant is me.
Silly! Because there is so, so much more to it than that:
Gallbladders never exited a human chest cavity so smoothly and easily.
Surgeons can even hot swap tools on the fly, while the main SPIDER frame remains inside the patient! Again, any real surgeons out there who want to throw cold water on this and say “ho hum” please feel free to do so in the comments. I’ll be scheduling an unnecessary designer gallbladder surgery. [Medgadget via Boing Boing]
Kif
Monday, October 25, 2010 at 10:35 AMOoh, makes me wanna get apendicitis and have a play!
Raj
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 12:24 AMSounds interesting. Not used in Aus as far as I know, but 2 things stand out:
1) If the gallbladder needs to be removed, there’s no chance it can be compressed that much.
2) The initial incision is just above the umbilicus, not over it.