Below is an excerpt for the featured article in General Surgery News
We’ve glimpsed a possible future of robotic surgery, and it’s just slightly larger than a bread box.
Weighing less than two pounds, the miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant (MIRA) is about the size of a human hand and fits into a patient’s abdomen through a single 2.5- to 3-cm umbilical incision. Assembled together, the robot and a camera extend no more than 24 inches.
“When we started our research into robotic surgery, we thought the current iteration on the market—the very large and expensive da Vinci system [Intuitive Surgical]—was probably not the right way to go about it,” said Dmitry Oleynikov, MD, the co-founder and chief medical officer of Virtual Incision, a medical device company that develops miniaturized robotic support systems. “The analogy we use is comparing the big mainframe computers from the 1970s and 1980s to what we have now, in our watches and iPhones.”