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BY
JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff
That it was a robot instead of a surgeon that
performed an operation to relieve him of severe heartburn was
of little concern to David Ritchie, a 52-year- old school bus
driver from Palmdale.
“If you had heartburn like I did, you’d
be willing,” said Ritchie, for whom medication had proven
agonizingly ineffective during the eight years he suffered.
“For the first time, I’m virtually
pain-free,” Ritchie told reporters a week after his surgery
during the unveiling of the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional
Technology.
A collaboration among the UCLA Medical Center,
the California NanoSystems Institute and the Department of Biomedical
Engineering, as well as industry partners, the center will develop
the surgical technology and expertise of the future. It’s
co-directed by Carlos Gracia, chief of Minimally Invasive Surgery,
and Peter Schulam, chief of Endourology and Laparoscopic Surgery.
After nearly a year of training, surgeon Joe Hines,
head of the UCLA Heartburn Treatment Center, directed the center’s
experimental robot to make five 1/4- to 1/2-inch incisions in
Ritchie’s abdomen. Seated at a console across the room from
his patient, with his hands in two egg-shaped “gloves,”
he guided the sensitive controls while issuing additional instructions
to the voice-activated robot through a microphone. Throughout
the procedure, a fiber-optic laparoscope the robot had inserted
into one incision allowed Hines a view of the operating area on
a computer screen.
“It’s a very enabling technology,”
Hines said, noting that the computer makes surgery more precise
by translating the surgeon’s larger movements into very
small ones. It will also adjust for human error such as muscle
tremors, which even the most-skilled surgeons experience.
“This technology will allow us to do things
we’ve never done before,” said E. Carmack Holmes,
chairman of the Department of Surgery. “We will go beyond
the capability of human performance.”
Copyright 2002 UC Regents
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