The surgeons use the robot for a small minority of the more than 900 surgical procedures they perform each year on U-M Congenital Heart Center patients, but they expect the number will grow in the future.
The system has two main components: a seven-foot-high robot with three cable-driven that hold tiny instruments and a small camera while they are inserted into the patient's chest through small incisions, and a visualization and guidance station where the surgeon can manipulate the robot arms using three-dimensional images from the camera inside the patient.
The Congenital Heart Center surgeons share the robot with numerous other adult and pediatric surgeons at UMHS, from urologists who use it to remove prostate glands without damaging nearby nerves, to gynecologists who extract fibroids while sparing a woman's uterus.
At the STS meeting, Ohye will show video footage of operations to divide a vascular ring -- a rare birth defect in which blood vessels surround the esophagus and trachea, reducing a child's ability to breathe.
He will also present data on five vascular ring division patients who had a robot-assisted minimally invasive operation, and ten who had conventional open-chest surgery for the same problem. The data also include two other children who had robot-assisted surgery for other congenital heart defects -- a persistent left superior vena cava, and the placement of electrical leads for an implanted pacemaker to correct a heart rhythm irregularity.
The robot-assisted children ranged in age from 1 to 10 years, and the smallest weighed 10 kilograms, since the camera is too large to fit between the ribs of a smaller child.
The seven robot-assisted children had a median hospital stay of two days, compared with four days for children who had open-chest surgery. One p
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Contact: Kara Gavin
kegavin@umich.edu
734-764-2220
University of Michigan Health System
28-Jan-2004