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Peak's Plasmablade is Sci-Fi-like Surgical Tool of the Future
Posted by Kit Eaton at 11:20 PM on July 25, 2008
Cutting open a person for surgery using a plain old scalpel seems pretty barbarian compared to this new cutting tool from Peak. Instead of a sharp metal edge, or even an electrosurgical cutter, the Plasmablade uses pulses of plasma generated around its tip to locally cut and cauterise flesh such as skin, fat and muscle. It has the advantages of not damaging nearby tissue since its generated heat remains short term and local, and there's less... uh... smoke to worry about than with electrosurgical tools. If you can stomach the idea, there's a pretty graphic demo video of the blade in action. Just don't be eating while you watch.
Thanks to the research team at EnteroMedics, there may be new hope in our quest to lose weight while avoiding regular physical activity and a healthy diet. The device they have come up with is implanted just under the skin and uses electrical signals to block the vagus nerve—which controls how the stomach expands when we eat. Naturally, if the stomach doesn't expand, that would mean that the user would feel full much faster than normal. It also reduces our craving for food in general.
The vanity-saturated life of a Gizmodo writer means no scars, visible or otherwise, so this breakthrough procedure for appendicitis is a godsend for those among us who still have the vestigial organ. According to doctors who performed the operation in San Diego, a flexible tube is used to thread miniature surgical instruments down the patient's throat into their stomach. At that point, the fun begins—unless you're an appendix, of course.
And the Lord came to Dr. Daniel Low and told him: "Praise the iPhone, for it can make your calls, get your mail, play your music, browse the web, and now help kids go to surgery without having to use sedatives to calm them down!" And the Lord—who looked remarkably like 
A neurosurgery team at Osaka University is now installing brain-machine interfaces directly into patients' heads. They claim the invasive open-skull surgery allows control over robotic limbs with the mind more accurately. In fact, in trials with four test subjects, their method has more than 80% accuracy.
Just last year, we showed you the concept 
Right now, the best Doogie Howser-bot around still requires a surgeon to actually go through motions of surgery, making them suffer hand cramps and light perspiration, when they could be sipping lattes or curing cancer. Well, researchers at the Imperial College London are upgrading the Da Vinci surgery robot so operating docs can control it with their eyes. 
According to the experiments by the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Centre team, playing some Wii games improve surgeons' performance. The study pitted a group of eight trainee surgeons, who spent one hour on the Wii, against normal trainees in a surgery virtual reality simulator. However, only a few games help this:
The i-Snake may sound like a cheap iPod peripheral, but it is actually the name of a revolutionary concept surgical robot, which hopes to advance keyhole surgery significantly. A team at Imperial College, London, has been awarded a £2.1 million ($A4.78 million) grant to work on the device, which will be an elongated tube with a series of motors, sensors and imaging tools.
Do you want a hot set of washboard abs to impress the ladies with? Are you also much too lazy to actually do the situps required to get them naturally? Good news, America! You can get "abdominal etching" done, a form of plastic surgery that gives you a six pack without the work. For a mere $4,000 to $7,000 you too can have an awkward combo of manboobs and a sixpack to confuse and perhaps titillate the ladies. Stay tuned for a review of the procedure by our very own Jason Chen, god willing. [
