History was made by Dr. Tejas Patel, a senior cardiologist who has performed more than 300 robotic surgeries so far, when he took his seat behind a console at the Swaminarayan Temple in Gandhinagar to perform an angioplasty on a middle-aged woman. The patient was in the operating theatre of Apex Hospital, some 32 KM away from the temple, and was operated through the world’s first in-human telerobotic coronary intervention.
The woman had suffered a heart attack and underwent angioplasty to remove a blockage in an artery a few days ago. On 6th Dec, blockage in another blood vessel was removed through robotic procedure. This heart procedure was carried out by an internet-enabled robotic arm at the cath-lab in the operation theatre of hospital and team of doctors was attending the patient to take care of any eventualities.
Mark Toland, CEO of US-based Company that provided technology for the surgery, said the first telerobotic surgery was performed in 2001 when laparoscopic gallbladder procedure was performed from across Atlantic. He added, “This was the first ever minimal invasive catheter-based heart procedure in the world. With such technology, the expertise of surgeon such as Dr. Patel can be transferred within seconds to patients”.