Why is robotic surgery important?

Robotic surgery puts a computer between the surgeon and the patient. In this HealthMaker video, Gregory Hager, PhD, chair of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, discusses how this can drive innovation in medicine.

Transcript

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One of the main contributions of robotics is just it's opened a whole new opportunity

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for the sorts of enhancements that we've talked about using a whole new tool set. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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So I think the importance of robotic surgery is twofold. The first is it opens a new space of tools

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that we can now apply in medicine. As in many areas, what you find is that innovation tends to follow certain paths,

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and those paths are defined by history. People tend to continue to follow them. And it's only when there's something disruptive

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that suddenly you get to move to a whole new level, and a new space opens in front of you. So I think one of the main contributions of robotics

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is just it's opened a whole new opportunity for the sorts of enhancements that we've talked about using

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a whole new tool set. The second thing it does is it now puts a computer between the human performing

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the surgery and the device that's actually carrying out the surgery. Once you've got that computer in there,

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you now have access to a complete record of what happened in a particular surgery or any surgery, which means we now have data

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that we never had before in how humans perform these delicate, highly precise, highly skilled tasks.

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And we can use that data to start to understand, what are the new facilities, the new abilities,

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the new capabilities that we'd like to put inside the system to make surgeons even better?

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And that really, I think-- again, we talked about opening this space. That's really where the space is.

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It's we can engineer the robot better. We can engineer the surgeon console better, but we now have the opportunity to start

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to put intelligence between the surgeon and the patient in ways that we couldn't ever do before.