Surgical robots to become ubiquitous in Indian hospitals

 13-Sep-15, The Hindu 

Days are not far off when surgical robots will become a normal feature in hospitals for procedures like MRI scans, a senior official of Intuitive Surgical Inc. said on Sunday.

Image: The Hindu

The US-based Intuitive Surgical makes surgical robots that enable minimally invasive surgeries with its da Vinci surgical systems.

The primary surgical domains are urology, gynaecology, general surgery and cardiothoracic.

“In India we are in infancy in the technology adoption curve. Today a hospital without a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan machine is considered as a clinic,” Jeroen M.M. van Heesewijk, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and Global Distribution, said.

The Vattikuti Foundation is planning to increase the number of surgeons trained on robotic surgical systems to 300. “Presently, there are 147 surgeons trained in robotic surgeries in India. They do 300-400 robotic surgeries. Our target is to increase the surgeons trained in robotic surgeries to 300 by 2020,” said Mahindra Bhandari, CEO.

According to him, when the foundation was started in 2009-10 there were only five or six surgeons trained to carry out robotic surgeries.

 Read the full article 

 Insights