Robotic Surgery — Squeezing into Tight Places

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Abstract
Back in the 1980s, the rationale for building a surgical robot was the stuff of science fiction. Intent on providing “a doctor in every foxhole,” military strategists envisioned a severely wounded soldier being loaded into a battlefield ambulance equipped with a robot so that a surgeon at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, miles away could perform life-saving telesurgery to prevent exsanguination or some other physiological catastrophe. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a similar vision. A terrestrial physician would be able to remove an acutely inflamed appendix from a patient aboard a robot-equipped space station. In this high-tech future, surgery could be performed skillfully and promptly even in dangerous or inaccessible places.