Robotics in surgery

The application of robotics to health care has been underway for about 10 years. The first area that received and is still receiving great attention is the area of rehabilitation robotics. The lessons learned in this field provide a number of signals for surgical robotics. The state of the art in robotic technology for the operating theatre can be summarised by giving some examples. These are described in order of increasing complexity, from the perspective of the user rather than the designer. Two classifications are used to describe this complexity. The first is between active and passive systems, and the second is an intrinsically safe device. The devices described are the wand, motorised stereotactic frames, prostatectomy, stapedotomy, and active endoscopy