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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: 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.