Heart bypass surgery is a common operation in America but a drastic one, too. To reach the heart and replace the blocked blood vessels that supply it, surgeons have to cut open one’s breastbone.

But at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, doctors have been trying an alternative: a system known as da Vinci. Instead of opening a patient’s chest, surgeons make a few small incisions to insert tiny robot arms. The robot’s arms have wrists with eight degrees of freedom that allow the surgeon “to bend around corners and work in ways that are much more natural,”. This allows full range of motion and the ability to rotate instruments 360 degrees through tiny incisions. Direct and natural hand-eye instrument alignment is similar to open surgery, with “all-around” vision and the ability to zoom in and out.
Another advantage with da Vinci is the elimination of tremor…

“There’s a lot of invasion that goes along with traditional Heart bypass,” said Dr. Robert Poston, who helped Robotic heart surgery bypass surgery at Maryland and has recently become chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Medical Center. “If you can avoid all that, and go in between the ribs, not crack any bones, then that is one less thing you have to heal up.”

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