Bright Ideas: Surgical robotics

The surgical robot's pincers and clamps are far more precise than the human hand. Photo / Supplied by Intuitive Surgical

Catherine Mohr
Medical research director, Intuitive Surgical

It was probably inevitable that Catherine Mohr would end up doing something interesting with her life. Her father, who was born in China to British missionary parents, came to NZ during World War II. He met her mother, who is a biostatistician, at Otago University.

Although the family left New Zealand when Mohr was a preschooler, she has kept her Kiwi passport. And she happily accepted an invitation to return home last month as a guest of the Ministry for Research, Science and Technology, and as a speaker at Morgo, Jenny Morel's annual get-together for entrepreneurs.

Mohr began her career as an engineer, working for many years at Californian technology company AeroVironment, where she helped to develop alternative-energy vehicles and high-altitude aircraft. In 1987 she raced from Darwin to Adelaide in a solar-powered electric car, in the first World Solar Challenge. But mid-career she decided she wanted a new challenge and went off to medical school, where she invented a brilliantly simple device, the LapCap, that makes laproscopic surgery safer.

Incredibly, she also became a mother part-way through her medical degree. "It taught me that I really couldn't balance family, these all-consuming clinical responsibilities, and the type of research and small business and entrepreneurial stuff I'd been doing."

These days she oversees the development of next-generation surgical robots and robotic procedures, as the director of medical research at Intuitive Surgical. She also works at Stanford's School of Medicine, where she studies simulation-based teaching methods to teach clinical skills to budding doctors.

If the idea of a robot performing your surgery makes you nervous, then relax - it's been happening for quite a while. In fact, there are four such robots in New Zealand hospitals and they are becoming increasingly common around the world.

Intuitive Surgical's slogan is "taking surgery beyond the limits of the human hand". It's like giving superpowers to surgeons, says Mohr, by using 3D imaging and intuitive controls to manipulate the robot's pincers and clamps far more precisely than typical manual surgery.

The robots are most commonly used to cure sleep apnoea, perform a gastric bypass, and prostate surgery. In the United States, 75 per cent of radical prostatectomies are now done by robot.

As well as helping to get people off chronic medication and making them better much sooner, surgical robots could help senior surgeons mentor less experienced staff. Using a simulator interface and remote-controlled instruments, Mohr's operating room of the future will be more video game than butcher's slab by focusing on fewer incisions, more flexibility and more versatility.

Another development Mohr is excited about is infra-red vision markers - non-radioactive chemicals which bond to tissue and are made to fluoresce. They can be used to pinpoint cancer cells, bloodflow in vessels, or delicate nerve tissue and could radically improve cancer treatment.