Surgeons using keyboards, joysticks, and the like can make movements that control advanced surgical robots—such as "Da Vinci"" and "Zeus®"—in the performance of long-distance, unassisted surgery.
On September 7, 2001, Jacques Marescaux of the University of Strasbourg, France, and the IRCAD European Institute of Telesurgery, and Michael Gagner, chief of the Department of Laparoscopic Surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, removed the gallbladder of a sixty-eight-year-old woman in Strasbourg, more than 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Surgeons. Other medical staff stood by in Strasbourg but did not have to intervene.
"Operation Lindbergh," as it was dubbed, required a high-speed optical-fiber network to relay the information. The time lag between the surgeons initiating a movement and watching the result on their display was one eighth of one second. The operation was performed laparoscopically: a camera and instruments were inserted into the patient through small incisions. The operation took fifty-four minutes, similar to conventional gallbladder surgery. Such advances allow specialized surgery to take place virtually anywhere, even in such remote places as space stations, with the human surgeon far away.
In May 2006 a surgical robot performed an unassisted procedure in Milan, Italy. Carlo Pappone, the head of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Milan's San Raffaele University, monitored the operation from Boston, Massachusetts. The fifty- minute surgery was carried out to control the irregular heart rhythm of a thirty-four-year-old man.
