You can’t replace operating room experience, but surgical robots can do things humans cannot.
When doctors first approached Hormuz Irani, a surgical oncologist based in Bakersfield, Calif., to suggest he participate in the hospital’s robotic-surgery training program, he resisted. He’d been performing laparoscopic surgery since 1995 and heard that the Da Vinci robot was bulky, expensive, and time-consuming. But when he actually started using what he refers to as the “workhorse,” he saw the future of surgery. The optics were clearer. Tremors from his hand vanished because the robot moved in a fluid motion. Smaller incisions left his patients with less pain and shorter healing times. The arms of the robot swiveled 360 degrees, allowing it to do things the human wrist cannot—sew backward, for example, or sew underneath tissue.
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