Your surgeon, a robot, will see you soon

How the robotic revolution promises to make surgeons more efficient and help patients recover more quickly from surgeries

Do you remember that viral video of a surgical robot stitching a grape back together? That video was uploaded almost 10 years ago. Since then, the field of robotic surgery experienced massive growth in terms of technological capabilities, investments and the number of robots deployed worldwide.

These sophisticated medical machines promise to make surgeries less invasive, accelerate the recovery and healing process and enable patients to return to their normal lives more quickly. Surgeons are offered a new way of performing surgeries with robots that provide unprecedented access to the human body and tools that feel like extensions of their own hands. Hospitals can also benefit from increased patient turnaround and from the perception of being at the forefront of medical technology by having some of the most advanced medical devices available.

At least that’s what the advocates of surgical robots say.

In this article, we will take a deep dive into the world of robotic-assisted surgery, what difference the surgical robots promise to make and what the reality actually looks like.

The robot surgeons enter the operating room

Traditional surgeries are highly invasive procedures. To perform an operation, a surgeon must first make a large incision, wide enough to accommodate the surgeon's hands and tools, to access the problematic body part. Afterwards, the patient must recover from the surgery, a process that can be lengthy, painful, and uncomfortable.

To address the problems of traditional open surgery, surgeons introduced laparoscopic surgeries. In laparoscopic surgeries, small incisions (usually 0.5–1.5 cm) are made in the abdomen to insert thin tubes with specialized instruments as well as tubes with a camera and light at the end. Because laparoscopic surgeries eliminate the need for large incisions, the recovery is quicker and less painful compared to traditional open surgery.

Laparoscopic surgeries are a significant advancement over traditional open surgeries, yet there is always potential for further improvements and innovations. One of those disruptive innovations is robotic-assisted surgeries. In many ways, robotic-assisted surgeries are similar to laparoscopic surgeries. Both procedures are minimally invasive and require only small incisions to insert the tools into the body. The key difference lies in the control of the tools: in laparoscopic surgeries, a surgeon directly manipulates the tools, whereas in robotic-assisted surgeries, the surgeon controls the tools via a robot. The surgeon uses specialized controls that translate their inputs into precise movements of the tools inside the patient's body.

The first surgical robot to receive FDA approval was the Da Vinci system, developed by Intuitive Surgical, in 2000. Since then, Intuitive has risen to become the leader in the space of surgical robotics. It currently offers a family of Da Vinci robots - Da Vinci Xi, Da Vinci SP and Da Vinci X. The company boasts that, through 2022, over 12 million procedures have been performed worldwide using Da Vinci systems. Every 17 seconds, somewhere in the world, a surgeon starts a procedure using one of over 7500 Da Vinci robots.

Other players include Medtronic and their Hugo robot, Johnson and Johnson’s Ottava robot, Stryker’s Mako, CMR’s Versius, Vicarious Surgical and more. Even Google with their life science company Verily worked together with Johnson & Johnson to create a surgical robot in 2015.

According to a report published by Bain & Company, the robotic surgery market was a $3 to $3.5 billion global market at the beginning of 2023, up from around $800 million in 2015. Another report estimated the value of the market at $5.16 billion in 2021 and projected it to reach $20.98 billion by 2030, while yet another report predicts the market value to reach $7.62 billion in 2024 and $11.76 billion by 2029. In either case, the image that emerges is that surgical robotics is a growing, multibillion-dollar market. As Bain & Company report states, 78% of US surgeons are interested in surgical robotics, which hints at the potential demand for these robots.

Robotic-assisted surgeries are frequently used by urologists, gynecologic surgeons, general surgeons, cardiothoracic surgeons, colorectal surgeons and orthopaedic surgeons.

What does a robotic surgeon bring to the operating table?