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EYE ROBOT
(Daily Press (Victorville, CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 19--APPLE VALLEY
--Until recently, options for surgery in the Victor Valley included traditional surgery with a large, open incision or laparoscopy, which uses small incisions but is typically limited to very simple procedures.
A new category of surgery using minimally invasive robotics, which is a futuristic alternative to traditional methods, is changing how some surgery will be done in the High Desert.
The da Vinci roboticassisted surgery system is now available at St. Mary Medical Center, the first and only hospital in the area offering the high-tech procedure.
The hospital recruited Dr. Pedram Ilbeigi, who has several years of experience as the director of robotic surgery for a facility in New Jersey, to start up the hospital's robotic program.
"We're very happy to have Dr. Ilbeigi in town and to bring this new technology to the High Desert," said Randy Bevilacqua, the hospital's vice president of marketing and communications.
The robotic system has three components:
--a surgeon's console;
--a robot with four arms -- one to control the camera and three to manipulate instruments -- that is at the side of the patient's operating table and is manipulated by the surgeon; and,
--a high-definition, 3-D vision system.
Using the robotic system, a surgeon operates on a patient while seated at a console viewing a 3-D image of the surgical area.
The surgeon's fingers hold the master controls below the display. The system seamlessly transposes the surgeon's hand and wrist for greater precision during the operation than the human hand can allow.
In a procedure this week, Ilbeigi used the roboticassisted system on a patient diagnosed with a muscle-invasive bladder cancer.
"We're using this da Vinci robotic system to remove her bladder and we're going to reconstruct her a brandnew bladder. And usually under normal surgery she would lose about 2 liters of blood; with the robotic, it is only about 200 milliliters, which is virtually no blood loss," Ilbeigi said.
He said using traditional surgery for this type of bladder repair procedure would mean the female patient would lose some of her anatomy around the bladder. With robotic surgery, Ilbeigi is able to reconstruct the bladder without disturbing or removing other organs.
I l b e i g i re ce n t l y opened his own practice, Urological Institute of the High Desert, and said that robotic surgery will have its most significant impact on prostate surgery.
He said that traditional prostate surgery gives a patient an incision from the pelvic bone to the belly button, and the patient spends about four days in hospital with a six- to 12-week recovery time.
"With robotic prostate surgery, they go home in less than 24 hours. It is precise surgery with no blood loss, no blood transfusion," Ilbeigi said.
Ilbeigi said major advantages of robotic surgery are precision, less risk of infections, smaller incisions, decreased blood loss, less pain and quicker healing time.
As with any surgical procedure, hospital officials say it is important that possible candidates understand that surgery is both patient and procedure specific.
To see more of the Daily Press, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.vvdailypress.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, Daily Press, Victorville, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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