The BBC reports on a new flexible surgical robot cakked the i-Snake. The article says experts believe the i-Snake could revolutionize keyhole surgery.
Minimally invasive surgery has obvious advantages - it can mean smaller scars, reduced hospital stays and shorter recovery times.
Surgeons are also looking at ways to avoid skin incisions altogether.
One approach is Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery or Notes. This means operating in the peritoneal space through natural orifices or cavities, such as the bowel.
Lord Darzi said: "The unrivalled imaging and sensing capabilities coupled with the accessibility and sensitivity of i-Snake will enable more complex diagnostic and therapeutic procedures than are currently possible.
Robots and lasers are going to make life easier. New technologies like the i-Snake are going to make a lot of invasive surgeries unnecessary. The Daily Mail also has an article on the i-Snake.
Mark Phillips from CBS News explains the surgery that 2-year-old Lakshmi Tatma will be undergoing. She was born with four arms, four legs as well as entangled organs. CBS says Lakshmi is set to have her "parasitic twin" removed in a complex and risky surgery performed by a huge team of 30 doctors. Some positive news here from CNN says Lakshmi's surgery was a succcess.
Would you like a robot to help out with those hard to reach places during surgery? New Scientistreports on a tiny 15 millimetre surgical robot that is already being tested on pigs.
The robot, developed by Dmitry Oleynikov and colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, can move around inside the stomach or abdomen to give surgeons a new perspective on the area being operated on. It is also equipped with a retractable needle, allowing it to perform biopsies.
The device is made up of two rotating aluminium cylinders connected by a thick axle, which carries the camera. The spiral pattern on the surface of the cylinders allows them to grip the walls of the abdominal cavity and move around. "They have been designed not to slip or damage the tissue," Oleynikov says.
The robot is only 15 millimetres in diameter, allowing it to be inserted through the small incisions in the abdomen used for keyhole surgery (Surgical Endoscopy, vol 20, p 135). It is controlled from a console equipped with a joystick.
The article also talks about how Oleynikov has already used the robots to perform abdominal surgery on live pigs. The robot enters through the mouth which spares the patient an abdominal scar. However, there would be an incision "through the stomach wall" so the patient is only spared a visible scar.
The BBC reports that a New Jersey nasal surgery test (published in the journal Cephalagia) on 21 migraine patients reduced the severity of the headaches and cut the length of the migraines in half. The goal of the surgery was to correct intranasal contact points found on CT scans that researchers believed where stimulating nerves and causing pain.
It has been known that when opposite surfaces in the nasal cavity touch and press against each other they stimulate one of the main nerves in the face called the trigeminal nerve; which in turn causes secretion of a special substance that is irritant to the nasal tissue.
When this occurs it has known in certain instances to confuse the brain into interpreting the stimulation as a headache - a phenomenon known as referred pain.
The researchers evaluated 21 patients who had severe migraines that had not responded to conventional treatment.
CT scans of the sinuses revealed that these 21 patients had intranasal contact points.
The BBC article also indicates that migraines have also been linked to a heart defect and that all migraines may not be curable with the new sinus surgery.
The BBC 