William Peine Quotations

What you really want is a hand tool that has robotic capability so that a surgeon could be in the middle of a procedure and be able to bring in the robot.

Robots don't perform the surgeries, but they are tools that give the surgeon more dexterity.

With interventional radiology, doctors will use real-time X-rays, called fluoroscopy, to see what the probe is doing inside the patient. Surgeons will be able to enter an artery near the groin area and navigate through arteries and into the heart, brain, to other major organs, snaking all through the venous system to perform surgeries in those areas of the body.

Conventional surgical robots are the equivalent of a sophisticated racecar compared to your basic family sedan. For some surgeries, you need a complex robot, but for many surgeries you do not. You wouldn't take an Indy racecar to the grocery store.

The robot can reach into the area very precisely and avoid those nerves.

They call this the fulcrum effect. If I move the handle up, the tip moves down inside the body. If I move it down, it moves up, left and right are reversed. But a robot can understand all the mechanics and compensate for them, eliminating the fulcrum effect.

If you have cancer of the stomach, doctors would go in with the instrument and remove that area of tissue. Another possible application is fixing reflux disease. A new area that doctors are pursuing is trans-gastric surgery, where you go into the mouth, enter the stomach, make an incision in the stomach wall and then into the abdominal cavity. Once you are in the abdominal cavity, you can remove someone's gall bladder, for example. Because you gain entry through the mouth, there is no scar.