Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital yesterday unveiled its second high-calibre surgical robot, as part of an ambitious plan for Thailand to be Southeast Asia’s hub for robotic surgery.
Worth Bt120 million, the machine will boost the hospital’s surgery capacity. It follows the success of a first robot, which operated on over 1,000 patients.
The Da Vinci Robot II and its predecessor were shown at a press conference yesterday performing surgery on a prostate cancer patient and a colon cancer patient through live feeds.
Dr Udom Kachintorn, dean of Mahidol University’s Faculty of Medicine at Siriraj Hospital, said the hospital’s first robot had treated over 1,000 patients since 2007 – a record in Southeast Asia.
Udom said the robot could work on various cases, including open-wound surgery and laparoscopic surgery, and thus gave the hospital choices on the most suitable approach for treatment.
Department of Surgery deputy head Dr Apirak Chuangsuwanit said the 1,000 patients operated on by the first robot involved 860 prostate cancer cases, 35 kidney cancer cases, five bladder cancers, 10 cervical cancer/endometrium cancers, as well as 106 cases of other cancers, esophageal atresia and gastroesophageal reflux disease.
Department of Urology chief Dr Chaiyong Nuanyong said, unlike the single-console first robot, the Da Vinci Robot II had two sets of consoles for master control and four robotic arms.
The first arm functioned as an endoscopic camera giving the surgeon a three-dimensional image ten times bigger than the actual size, while the other three arms operated as the surgeon’s hands.
The surgery procedure was less painful and could be applied with small incisions in the body, which helped patients recover faster and with fewer complications.
Chaiyong said the robotic arms could be used only ten times and robot maintenance costs were tens of millions of baht a year.
He said the cost for robotic surgery was three times higher than normal surgery, which was around Bt100,000. Thailand now has six surgical robots, with two at Siriraj.
Sumber: nationmultimedia.com
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