Robot Surgery practice questions; 3a,b,d

3. Surgeons perform surgery with robot assistance. A step further has led to remote controlled robots to perform on patients thousands of miles away.

a.) One input device would be a camera that the robot uses as its vision. An output device would be a screen that the person operating the robot uses to see what it sees.

b.) One capability is that a robot can make very precise movements without any sudden movements or jerking motions, which a human could do if one did not have a steady hand and was particularly nervous due to the critical state of a patient. A limitation would be that a robot may have delayed reactions to controls from far away or even from within the room. If a robot was accidentally told to make an incorrect movement, then it could be too late for the surgeon to make the robot stop its movement before it causes harm to the patient.

d.) One economic concern would be purchasing the robot. A remote-controlled robot would not replace the need for human hands, it would just be an assistance tool. The hospital would have to have the money in order to purchase the robots for their surgeons to use, and the robots won't cause any significant cut down in having to pay for something. While the use of these robots may allow the surgeons to work at home and save money on transportation, this cost is insignificant compared to the cost of several of these surgeon robots. The hospital would have to have millions of dollars in extra funds in order to pay for them. A reliability concern may be that the robot's camera is not very clear, and that it could give a blurry image that would be hard for a surgeon to see. This becomes a very big problem when working in a part of the body where there are many small and sensitive components that are hard to see and all look alike. A blurry image may cause the surgeon to not be able to distinguish very well between one part of the body and another, or to not see a part all together and irritate it without knowing while working on another part. While sending a camera inside the human body to see what the surgeon is doing requires a lot less cutting up the patient's body to get there, a blurry camera could cause the surgeon to unknowingly cause internal damage, which would be very hard to go back and correct. The doctor seeing what he is doing with his or her own eyes would be much safer and reliable, although it would require the patient to be cut open much more in some cases. A concern for the patient would be allowing a remote-controlled machine controlled by a doctor miles away to operate on their body. The patient may be concerned that the connection between the operator and the robot are lost at some critical point during the surgery, in which case the surgeon would not be able to do anything to the patient, and the patient may wake up and find that their body is still cut open, and the pain could come back before the hospital can do anything. This is a legitimate concern, because there probably isn't another readily available surgeon specified for the job if the hospital has to rely on someone miles away. Even if there was someone who knew how to stitch the patient back up in case of a sudden need to abort the operation due to a loss of connection, if the surgeon was at a critical point that required things to be done in quick succession, then the patient could be in a much worse condition than they were prior to the surgery, especially if this were to occur in something like open heart surgery, in which connection could be lost while the heart is opened. While there may be someone else in the room who knows about how to complete the operation, most likely the most specialized surgeon would be the one initially doing the operation, i.e, the one originally controlling the robot, who was most experienced, so even so, the patient would have to rely on another surgeon who is probably less experienced and skilled at the work that the robot was performing.