Minimal Surgery ~ Keyholes + Robots + Imaging

This story spotted by BID's CEO Paul Levy about single-incision laparoscopic colectomy featuring surgeon Dr Deborah Nagle... ...has gotten me thinking more generally about the history and prospective future of Minimal Surgeries. Perhaps the first example of this I personally saw was out at Stanford when founder and then-CEO Dr Wes Sterman showing Heartport's method of doing chest keyhole surgeries without cracking the ribcage. Tufts chief neurosurgeon Dr Carl Heilman visited MIT for an IEEE/BMES series and showed remarkable examples of natural orifice procedures for brain surgery. (See here a USAToday piece on this theme more generally.) Then most recently, Conor Walsh and MIT colleagues have been collaborating with MGH radiologist Dr Rajiv Gupta to build the Robopsy image-guided robo-assisted tele-surgery tool. See here the first working demo on a living, breathing porcine patient...