CHENNAI: A rare heart surgery using a robot was recently perormed in a city hospital on 23-year-old D Vijayakanth, an auto driver from Vellore. Dr R Ravi Kumar, director of the institute of cardiovascular disease, robotic surgery centre at the Chettinad Health City who controlled the surgery, said on Friday that the robotically-assisted procedure involves replacing both the mitral and the aortal valve simultaneously. The surgery, done by a three armed robot, took four hours and cost Rs 2.25 lakh. "The best part about using a robot in cardiac surgery is that the patient's heart need not be opened and the surgery can be done using a small 4cm incision. This is not possible with normal surgeries without a robot," said Dr Ravi Kumar.
Robotic surgery, which is fairly new in the country, can be used for a gamut of medical procedures, said Dr Ravi Kumar. "It requires a lot of precision and intense training because though the robotic hands do the surgery, it has to be controlled by a trained surgeon. One of the biggest disadvantages is the lack of sensory perception which is there when the surgeon actually does the surgery himself," said Dr Ravi Kumar.
Talking from New Delhi where he is chairman and managing director of Medanta the Medicity, Dr Naresh Trehan, who pioneered robotic surgery in the country, said from a three-armed robot in 2002 to a four-armed robot now, robotic surgery has come a long way. "We have an institute where we train doctors to perform robotic surgeries. There are people who are doing colon surgery, prostate surgery and cardiac surgery using robots almost on a daily basis," he said.
The biggest advantage in this field, said Dr Ravi Kumar, was the time of recovery. He predicted that in the next 10 years almost 80% of the procedures in the country would be done using robots.
