Meet the Next Generation of Doctors--and Their Surgical Robots

When medical student Alyssa Murillo stepped into surgery, she was met with something most wouldn't expect to find in an operating room: a towering surgical robot. She wasn't there to observe the kind of surgeries she was used to seeing; instead she was getting an in-depth view inside the patient's body through the robot's video console. "It was incredible," says Murillo, who is now a forth-year general surgery resident at the University of California, San Francisco. "You have a full 3D view, which is different from any other minimally invasive surgery technique." The robot Murillo is referring to is the Da Vinci Surgical System.