Gadgetory

no scalpel and forceps needed in this operating room just for robotic arms to operate on a patient's heart controlled by a surgeon 10 feet away by digitizing the surgeons movements for the first time in 200 years surgeons hadn't had a tool that actually made them a better surgery dr. Douglas Boyd is a cardiothoracic surgeon at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento he's been incorporating robotics into his procedures for nearly two decades but is now training robots to do some of the work on their own along with researchers at UC Berkeley dr. Boyd is training them to do things like remove shrapnel and cancerous tissue put in stitches or make basic cuts it's simple work for a surgeon but incredibly difficult for a robot because of the soft tissue involved robots are very very accurate and doing things once they are told what to do they stay on task they don't get tired they don't get distracted to train the bots dr. Boyd performs a maneuver many times in a lab the motions are digitized and the average is used to program the robots all of the data is stored in the cloud so as the robot perfects the action it can be used to program other robots by cloud sourcing you have access to 15 or 20 experts now that that can that that can contribute to movements and that can be analyzed in the cloud but the robots do have some limitations there are two or three times slower than a surgeon and can't make decisions on their own which is why they won't be replacing doctors any time soon human beings in general are really good at abilities such as dexterity manipulation perception and robots are very very far away from from getting to that stage the UC Berkeley team led by Professor Ken Goldberg is hopeful that robot assisted surgery could one day connect patients and doctors no matter the location it opens up the door to be able to perform surgery at a distance in days gone by surgery was all about blood and guts in the future surgery will be about bits and bytes and of course bots in San Francisco I'm Kara Tsuboi cnet.com for CBS News