September 13, 2016.
A robot surgeon has just successfully carried out a very delicate eye operation in a British hospital. Doctors are confident and hope that this process will cure some forms of blindness.
Surgery in a hole less than 1mm in diameter
A complex eye surgery was, for the very first time, successfully performed by surgeons at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK. This surgery, which consisted of removing a membrane from the retina of the eye of a 70-year-old patient was made possible with the help of a robot, remotely controlled by two doctors.
This new device, dubbed the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device (R2D2), and developed by the Dutch medical robotics company Preceyes BV, has enabled these surgeons to achieve what their hands could never have done: operate through a hole with a diameter of less than 1 mm, drilled in the inner wall of the eye, to dissect a membrane one hundredth of a millimeter thick.
A new chapter in eye operations is open
In a press release, the hospital welcomed the success of this operation and the new medical avenues opened up by this new technology. ” Current technology, i.e. laser scanners and microscopes, allows us to monitor retinal disease at the microscopic level. But the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can do. With a robotic system we are opening a new chapter in eye operations, which currently cannot be performed », Declared Professor Robert MacLaren, who carried out the operation.
The hospital now intends to continue this clinical trial by directing operations on 12 patients. In a first step, the robot will be responsible for ” peel »The membranes located off the retina, without damaging it, then, as a second step, the robot will have to insert a needle under the retina in order to inject a liquid there. These operations should make it possible to determine whether it is possible to treat certain forms of blindness., in particular by inserting stem cells into the eye.
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