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To cater to the majority American readers, some terminology has been changed.
Surgery on humans using robots has been touted by some as a safer way to get your innards repaired – and now the figures are in for you to judge.
A team of university [researchers] have counted up the number of medical [mistakes] in America reported to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2000 to 2013, and found there were 144 deaths during robot-assisted surgery, 1,391 injuries, and 8,061 counts of device malfunctions.
If that sounds terrible, consider that 1.7 million robo-operations were carried out between 2007 and 2013. Whether you're impressed or appalled, the number of errors has the experts mildly concerned, and they want better safety mechanisms.
It's tricky to compare these robo-op figures to the error rate of pure-human surgeries for various dull reasons; one being that when mistakes are made, they're often settled out of court and are never admitted. With a machine involved, someone can blame the hardware. Between two and four per cent of operations in the US suffer from complications, according to one study, although that doesn't mean someone died in every case that went wrong.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/robot_surgery_kills_americans/
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Wednesday July 22 2015, @10:59PM
daVinci has a DRM element in every attachment. You use five attachments for each abdominal/pelvic operation (four arms + camera). Almost every other item in a surgical suite is aggressively cleaned/autoclaved and reused, but daVinci allows a total of 10 mounts of each attachment before it's scrap. When that counter hits zero, it's rejected by the system regardless of its functional status. They're made cheaply with this in mind, too; sometimes they fail early.
Every attachment costs $2k. This is where they make their money.
It's absolutely ridiculous. Any adept manufacturing group could make a mechanically superior part which can be, essentially, infinitely reused. This would be a tremendous cost savings. Yet, because they added an electronic handshake, suddenly mechanical reverse-engineering is "protected under the DMCA" and they rake in your cash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @11:08PM
Where's the free market?
Oh, right, medical devices are highly regulated by the FDA creating a barrier to entry.
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Thursday July 23 2015, @12:40AM
The FDA is actually irrelevant here. The barrier is higher, but I guarantee it would still be worth entering.
Except that the DMCA - not the FDA - has allowed them to lock things up thanks to asinine "digital protections." I'm actually OK with a slightly higher bar to entry, but thanks to the DMCA this barrier is infinitely high.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @02:50AM
The FDA and patents are the problems, not the DMCA. You don't need attachment interoperability with an overpriced system, you need a competitor who will create a cheaper and freer version so you don't buy daVinci.
(Score: 2, Informative) by sce7mjm on Thursday July 23 2015, @02:01PM
Agreed. I did some work which for a medical device which involved various probes and canulars all attached to a box of electronics. The competitors all did the same thing in almost the same way, except the probes and their connections differed to the machine. All requiring different methods of manufacture. This was due to the claim of one manufacturer holding the IP of that probe to that connector into that socket. Since it is quite a niche market no one could afford a court battle regardless of it being held up or not, the same probe with a different socket and different connector which then cost more to manufacture, all passed on to the customer of course. In fact the whole units where massively overpriced not because of massive profits but due to the cost of development being spread over (relatively) small production runs, including the selection of the front panel sockets to not collide with the competitors. Bonkers.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday July 23 2015, @07:29AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jcross on Thursday July 23 2015, @12:12PM
I got a chance to fool around with a DaVinci machine about ten years ago, and also to disassemble on of the hand-like attachments. These things are made to go in through a 10mm opening, so they are built really small, and the way they work is to run a bunch of very thin cables around some tiny pulleys. As you can imagine, curvature that tight causes a lot of fatigue on the cables, which IIRC were made of braided metal, and the fatigue can easily be concentrated in one area due to repetitive motions. This all adds up to the devices being tricky to make and the service life being somewhat unpredictable. I'm not saying they're not gouging, because they probably are, but I also think it might be fairly difficult to build one of these things to be long-term reusable, and the last thing DaVinci needs is for some penny-pinching hospital to keep reusing them until they break and giving the equipment a bad rep.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Thursday July 23 2015, @10:50PM