The Tiny Robots Revolutionizing Eye Surgery

Last September, Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmologist and professor at Oxford University, plunged a tiny robotic arm into Father William Beaver's eye. A membrane had recently contracted on the 70-year-old priest's retina, pinching it into an uneven shape and causing him to see the world as if reflected in a hall of mirrors. Using a joystick and a camera feed, MacLaren guided the arm of the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2 for short, through a tiny incision in the eye, before lifting the wrinkled membrane, no more than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, from the retina, and reversing Beaver's vision problems. It was the first operation performed inside the human eye using a robot. Since September, five more patients have undergone robot-assisted operations at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital in England, including one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2's unprecedented precision.