"they are still the only game in town so not much worry right now."
Well I guess it's time for you to learn of NeuRobot.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
here is excerpt of Discussion section:
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Discussion
Details of the NeuRobot have been reported previously.
1–5,7 The main feature of the system is a rigid insertion
cylinder, which is 17 cm long and 10 mm wide. This cylinder
houses a 3D endoscope, irrigation and suction channels,
and three robot arms. The robot arms are moved within the
endoscopic surgical field with three degrees of freedom:
rotation, swing of neck, and forward/backward motion. Although
movement of the robot arms is limited, it is possible
for the NeuRobot to perform many neurosurgical procedures.
It can carry various kinds of instruments—each 1
mm in diameter—in its arms, including a microforceps,
KTP laser, monopolar coagulator, bipolar coagulator, sharp
hook, and dissector.6 In addition, the three robot arms can be
controlled independently. In the surgery featured in this report,
various procedures such as cutting or dissecting were
performed by the center robot arm while surrounding structures
were retracted by the two lateral arms.
In the present case, we used the NeuRobot not to achieve
total removal of the tumor, but to remove only a superficial
portion of it. This was indeed the first step toward clinical
use of the NeuRobot and we confirmed the clinical safety of
this system. The NeuRobot is capable of performing commonplace
neurosurgical procedures such as dissection of
the sylvian fissure;4 however, its intended use is not within
a shallow operative field, where conventional microsurgical
procedure is safely performed with the aid of an operating
microscope. Instead, through its 10-mm-wide cylinder the
NeuRobot can perform sophisticated procedures deep within
the brain. We believe that the NeuRobot can be useful in
the surgical treatment of deep-seated lesions in which classic
microsurgical procedures cannot be adequately applied.
We will expand the use of this system to the treatment of
such lesions.
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If you like ISRG, then you should also check out Stereotaxis. IMO it is cheap and that is probably an understatement. woops it's going up today ... it is still cheap. |
