TechKnowledgey 2004
by Jeff Eckert
TechKnowledgey
2004
Events, Advances, and News
From the Electronics World
Advanced
Technologies
Bypass Surgery via Robotic
System
The da Vinci® Surgical System in the
operating room of St. Pierre Hospital,
Brussels, Belgium. Copyright 2004,
Intuitive Surgical, Inc.
Let’s say you’ve lived on pizza,
double cheeseburgers, and
potato chips for the last couple
decades and your aorta has begun to
look like a radiator hose stuffed full
of cottage cheese. The traditional
solution is to pry open your rib cage
and splice in a new piece of artery to
bypass the plugged one, which is
highly unpleasant and occasionally
fatal. Now, your prospects may have
improved.
For several years, Ventrica,
Inc. ( www.ventrica.com), and
Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (www.
intuitivesurgical.com), have been
collaborating in an effort to develop
a simpler, less traumatic approach.
Earlier this year, the
collaboration bore fruit when
Ventrica’s Endo MVP® Distal
Anastomotic Device was employed
as a component of Intuitive’s da
Vinci® Surgical System and was
successfully used in a closed-chest
coronary artery bypass procedure.
The device was inserted through
small incisions in the patient’s chest,
thereby minimizing physical trauma.
It was then deployed into the internal
thoracic artery and a coronary
artery to create an anastomotic
connection to bypass the blockage.
The technology is described as a
proprietary coupling method that
uses magnetic attraction to form a
self-sealing connection between two
blood vessels.
According to a Ventrica
spokesman, “The development of
technologies such as the Endo MVP
System represents a major breakthrough in providing surgeons with
the ability to perform beating heart
surgery through small ports or
incisions in the chest, thus reducing
patient pain, trauma, and recovery
time.”
The surgeon actually performs
the operation remotely from a
console that employs a 3-D viewer
and master controllers. Normally,
the console is located a meter or two
from the patient, but there is no
particular reason why it cannot
involve greater distances.
For example, if the equipment
was installed in a golf cart, the
surgeon could tee off while you were
being prepared for surgery and
perform the operation while in the
rough on the fourth hole. He might
have to allow a few other golfers to
play through, but no one ever said
that a career in medicine didn’t
involve sacrifices.
In any event, the da Vinci system
is now approved by the US Food and
Drug Administration and is being
deployed in hospitals in the US and
Europe. Fourteen were sold in the
first quarter of 2004 alone, so there
may be one near you. Approximately
700,000 bypass procedures are
performed each year in the US
alone, so there is no shortage of
potential patients.
The system can also be used for
mitral valve repair, gastric bypass
surgery, radial prostatectomy,
esophageal surgery, and other
procedures.
F
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NUTS & VOLTS
E
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Ventrica’s Endo Wrist® surgical instr
Copyright 2004, In
ments and console master controls.
uitive Surgical, Inc.
New Spin on Electronics
u
t
80
IBM ( www.ibm.com) and
Stanford University (www.
stanford.edu) have joined forces in
an attempt to create a new breed
of high-performance, low-power
electronics in the emerging field of
nanotechnology called “spintronics.”
To formalize the effort, scientists at
IBM’s Almaden Research Center and
JULY 2004
