Robot Helps Surgeon on World's First Long-Distance Heart Operations Digital Trends

You're a patient about to undergo heart surgery, but the surgeon performing the procedure hasn't turned up at the hospital and, in fact, is still 20 miles away at the time that the operation is due to be carried out. Not at all, if it's anything like a recently reported world's-first procedure carried out by a surgeon in India. Using a robot called the CorPath GRX, created by a company named Corindus, five patients were the recipients of the first remote. The robot was controlled using a workstation with multiple joysticks, which allowed the surgeon to control the robot in real time while getting visual feedback in the form of livestreaming video showing what it was seeing. The procedure performed was something called (PCI), in which a small structure called a stent is used to open blood vessels in the heart that have been narrowed by plaque buildup.