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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: 2) by Francis on Wednesday July 22 2015, @11:09PM
RTFA, they have some pretty specific attributions to the cause of death and injury, so it appears that it is actually mechanized equipment, rather than scalpels operated the old fashioned way.
It appears that the attribution in those cases is mostly pretty well established, so it's not a matter of the surgeon or something else cause the deaths. It's things like pieces falling off the robot or the robot powering down. I assume that for the robot moving incorrectly that there's some sort of log that's kept.