Remote work has evolved from answering Slack messages in your sweatpants to conducting brain surgeries on a patient 500 kilometres away.
Driving the news: A team of surgeons at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto have now completed 10 brain angiograms using a robot that they controlled remotely, marking a world-first for the procedure.
The team’s next project is to perform the first-ever remote surgery to remove blood clots on a patient in Sault Ste. Marie. The procedure, called an endovascular thrombectomy, is critical to the recovery of stroke patients.
Catch-up: Robo-surgeries have become a game-changer in recent years, with procedures now being conducted as far away as 12,000 kilometres. Just last year, a surgeon in Florida performed a first-of-its-kind prostate cancer operation on a patient in Angola.
Some studies have shown that these surgeries are more precise than traditional methods, can cause less pain to the patients, and lead to shorter recovery times.
Why it matters: This technology has the potential to dramatically improve Canadians' access to life-saving surgeries, especially in remote areas where hospitals often don’t have surgeons on site.
Since Sault Ste. Marie doesn’t have its own team capable of doing the blood-clot surgery, residents who need the procedure currently have to be flown to Sudbury.
While the upfront costs are high — the robot used by the St. Michael's surgeons costs between $1 million and $3 million — hospitals using the machine could save ~$2 million in costs a year.
Zoom out: Robots have already pulled off fully autonomous surgeries on pig organs, and researchers say human trials for fully-robotic surgeries could begin within the decade.—LA