Robotic Training

As I stated in my last post, I went to Hackensack New Jersey for a davinci robotic surgery training course this week. Since I am always talking about robotic surgery, I figured I would give a little course of my own. Seriously, if you want to see what I am talking about when I say "robotic prostatectomy", here you go.


This is the general set-up for a robotic prostatectomy, courtesy of Boston.com. The surgeon (that's me), sits at the console and performs the surgery via the robot, which is that big thing towering over the blue drapes in the background.


First the ports are placed into the patient by the surgeon, similar to any other laparoscopic surgery. Then once all the ports are in place, the robot is wheeled over to the patient and is attached to the ports. Long instruments are placed through this ports and they can be changed depending on what the surgeon needs.

A camera is placed through one of the ports. It actually has two lenses or cameras in one, so that the image the surgeon sees through the console is in 3-D. The image is magnified about 10 times normal so that all of the structures are very clearly visualized making surgery a lot more precise. This allows us to see vessels and nerves that are difficult to see during a regular surgery.

Finally, as you can see in this picture, we use two funny looking contraptions to operate and move the robot inside the patient. It allows better movement of the instruments than even our own wrists and fingers could. There are also 5 pedals that we use to do various things.

So, that's the robot in a nutshell.