Surgical Robots, AR & the Future of the Digital OR

Converging technology and the next logical step toward “intelligent” operating rooms

“The future of all surgery is minimally invasive surgery” —Dr. W. Scott Melvin, Chief of the Division of General Surgery at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Technology automates the operating room (OR) once again 

That new OR automation reality is here today, but in scattered pieces. Surgical simulation software, intraoperative imaging devices, surgical navigation systems, augmented reality, and surgical robots, are being brought together into what’s being hailed as the “intelligent” or “digital” operating room.

Surgical robotics, haptic-enabled augmented reality, sensor technology, GPUs, miniaturization, Cloud computing, simulations, and data analytics, are converging as the next logical step in the refinement of traditional open surgery into that of minimally invasive surgery (MIS); what MIS pioneer, Dr. W. Scott Melvin, surgical chief of the NYC-based Montefiore Medical Center, calls the “future of all surgery”.

MIS means that the days of breaking apart a chest bone to perform open-heart surgery are over. Instead, MIS replaces all that patient trauma and the visual gore of such a scene with small incisions—keyhole-size or smaller—some of which might well be microscopic.

Technology is coming in for a landing into the operating room in a very new and very big way.

The digital OR changes everything, and the surgical robot is the main actor. MORE