Word: michler
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...going to take real good care of you, you know that?" says Dr. Robert Michler, as he fixes his dark blue eyes on the 79-year-old patient to whom he's about to give a heart bypass. "I know that," answers Paul Oaks with a placid smile, as he lies on a gurney in a thin gown and floppy hospital...
Oaks has good reason to trust his surgeon. With more than 3,000 open-heart operations and some 400 transplants under his belt, Michler, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, is no novice. Then again, today's procedure will be no ordinary bypass. It will be one of the first in the country to replace the surgeon's hands with 2-ft.-long robotic arms. The metallic limbs will enter the patient's body through the narrow gaps between the ribs, cutting holes no bigger than a nickel--a far cry from the usual...
...There is no question in my mind that the future of heart surgery is in robotics," says Michler, whose team at OSUMC headed up the clinical trials that led this spring to the first Food and Drug Administration approval of a robotic partial-bypass procedure. Originally studied in the late 1950s as a way for Army surgeons to operate remotely on wounded soldiers on the battlefield, robotic surgery is just finding its way into leading medical centers across the U.S. With more than 500,000 heart-bypass operations performed each year in the U.S. alone, surgeons are eager for ways...
Back in the operating room, Michler prepares for the first incision--a small round hole through which the robotic arm will enter the left side of Oaks' chest. First goes the camera, then the miniature forceps and finally a tool called a cautery, which will be used to isolate the artery that the surgeons plan to attach to the heart to restore proper blood flow. As Michler steps back, the robot springs to life. Looking like the legs of an oversize metallic spider, the long black arms start to gyrate--both outside and deep inside the patient's body...
...hour later, several inches of the artery are dangling from the chest. While Michler and his team have the go-ahead from the FDA to attach the artery robotically to the beating heart, Michler's team is waiting for a better instrument to stabilize a small area on the heart so they can more precisely attach the artery. But even though they will finish the job by hand today, there's no need for a giant incision. Instead, they will work between the ribs in a hole no wider than a tennis ball to reattach the artery. About five hours...