People commonly use rocket science or brain surgery to refer to something incredibly complex and difficult. No wonder, then, that combining the two could result in something wonderful.
Powerful robotic arms developed by the Canadian Space Agency for the space shuttle and International Space Station – Canadarm and Canadarm2 – and a delicate surgical tool, dubbed neuroArm, are examples of the “wonderful things” that can happen when experts from different disciplines work together, says Garnette Sutherland, M.D.
Sutherland, a neurosurgery professor at the University of Calgary in Canada, used the first-generation neuroArm to conduct a clinical trial on 50 patients. That work, the subject of a paper recently published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, concluded that surgical robots such as this one improve precision and accuracy during brain surgery.
“A machine is inherently more precise and accurate than a human, as it can move in increments of microns while humans move in increments of millimeters,” said Sutherland. “The registration parameter of a robotic machine can be set to a specific patient and so is very accurate. It can do motion scaling, meaning if you move your hand an inch the machine might move one-twentieth of an inch, according to the scale you set. It moves much less and so is more precise.” Robotics also can filter out the tremors and shakiness that everyone has in their hands, further increasing the precision of the tool.
The surgical robotic arm was designed to work in conjunction with an MRI machine, as well as actually inside an MRI. This gives surgeons the ability to continually monitor their progress through detailed, three-dimensional images. A surgeon operates from a remote workstation that recreates the sight, sound and touch of surgery.
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