Devastated by the wishes of a pandemic, Israeli doctors obtain from an unlikely source: robots.
Orthopedic surgeons at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem on Mount Scopus welcomed their team to a newcomer.
It’s incredibly efficient, you never want a break for coffee, don’t complain about long hours and are afraid to catch COVID-19.
That is, it’s a robot.
Called ROSA, short for Robotic Surgical Assistant, the small white and blue robot has already shown its value in the operating room. Since ROSA’s arrival last year, thanks to a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Schools and Hospitals. At USAID Abroad, he has helped Hadassah update the knees of 20 patients.
For example, ROSA may warn surgeons that if they cut the bone at a 5-degree angle, it can save the right leg alignment, while a 3-degree angle will result in greater placement of the synthetic implant.
“ROSA doesn’t do the homework for me, but it takes me to the right position,” said Liebergall, whose branch plays more than three hundred knee replacements a year. “He guides me on where to cut the bone and at what angle, and gets this data from the patient’s anatomy.”
Robotic surgery is nothing new in Hadassah. For the past 15 years, Hadassah doctors have used the ACMazor Robotics rebirth management formula to place screws on patients’ spines with greater protection and precision. Another robot, Siemens’ Artis Zeego, provides real-time 3D imaging operations, eliminating the need for presurgical COMPUTed tomography and post-surgical X-rays.
“We have inserted thousands of screws using this technology. He’s one of our most productive friends in the operating room and has 99% accuracy,” Liebergall said. “Usually, the robot does not make mistakes, however, disorders occur. We know when to surrender and return to the previous method.
“We had to go from dozens of samples a day to thousands,” said Dr. Asaf Gertler, director of the Ein Kerem Campus Clinical Laboratory at Hadassah Medical Center. “Without robots, it would have been impossible.”
The rooms in which he works hold millions of dollars’ worth of machines made by Roche, Tecan and Qiagen. In all, Hadassah employs eight types of robots just to extract the RNA of the virus; each one uses different substances.
Professor Abd al-Rouf Higazi, head of clinical biochemistry at Ein Kerem Hospital, said the robots used by his facilities are “at the forefront of civil technology, more complex than F-35 fighter jets.” In the old days, Higazi’s laboratory obtained blood samples from a glass or plastic tube, accompanied through a written request directory of the tests to be performed. After testing, lab technicians would send an impression with the effects to the branch that had requested the test.
A doctor now enters the required tests on a computer, which produces a barcode label. When the tube arrives at the lab, a robot sends it to a centrifuge, where it is opened, transmitted to another device for analysis, closed and eventually sent to the files, in case a doctor decides to do one more test.
“You don’t have to touch the tube, ” said Higazi. “He does everything on his own.”
Robots can take care of 95% of all required tests, according to Higazi, with a few exceptions, such as antibody tests for neuroimmunology. Hadassah’s lab now processes about six hundred hour-consistent samples, or approximately four million consistent with the year.
“In the future, we hope to automate all serological testing and release human resources,” Higazi said. “When everything is automated, the number of errors is close to zero.”
Hadassah robots have been especially useful for spine surgeons. Dr. Josh Schroeder, a column surgeon at Hadassah’s Mount Scopus campus, is consistent with 10 to 15 surgeries consistent with the week; Three or four of them involve robots. A recent was about an employee of the Palestinian structure of the West Bank who had fallen from a scaffold, breaking 8 ribs and breaking his vertebrae.
“With the robot’s help, we did micro-incisions and healed his entire spine,” Schroeder said. “Robots can bring you to places you can’t see with the bare eye.”
This is the case of surgeries to correct deformities, where the anatomy is unclear. For example, for children with spinal muscular atrophy, an occasionally deadly genetic condition that causes a severe curvature of the spine, robots allow the insertion of correct good-natured screws without having to open all of the child’s skin, a surgical procedure.
“Instead of making massive cuts to the child’s back, we make a lot of small cuts to lessen surgical complications,” Schroeder said. “The robot takes it to the best trajectory to place a screw on the spine. Either I divulge the whole anatomy where the spinal cord is, or I can use the generation of robots to get to this place without seeing it.”
Schroeder, by comparison, helps with the robot to “the difference between driving an autonomous car with its eyes closed or on the road every second”.
In April 2017, he and Professor Leon Kaplan, head of the spinal surgery unit at Hadassah Ein Kerem, performed the world’s first double robot surgery, the Zeego robot and the Renaissance. And about a year and a part ago, the hospital “created a dialogue” that allows the two robots to communicate with each other essentially.
“In young children, in fact those who have a deformity, the spine moves constantly and you have to constantly look at what you are doing,” Schroeder said. “So the moment the robot provides us with real-time images as we go to make sure we’re still in sync.”
Schroeder said he didn’t see any defiance with robots, as long as they didn’t paint badly.
“We’re not yet in a position where robots can reposition us because they’re not 100 percent safe. But the technological improvement of human hands is phenomenal,” he said. “I think as robot generation evolves, it will be a vital component of our daily medical practice.”
This article was sponsored and produced in collaboration with Hadassah, the Zionist Women’s Organization of America, Inc., which celebrates the centenary of the Hadassah Medical Organization, the Henrietta Szold Hadassah School of Nurses, and the Hadassah Department of Ophthalmology. This article was written through the JTA local content team.