Surgical Skill
Given my profession as a theatre nurse this really got my interest. The da Vinci Surgical System is a set of computers and instrumentation. A technological advancement on the traditional Laparoscopic or “key-hole” surgery in that rather than the instruments being held by the surgeon they are held by a robot. The surgeon controls the movement of the instruments via a console. You can see the system and specs at their website.
Laparoscopic surgery takes a lot of skill. Not having the sense of touch and working from what you see on a monitor is totally different from “open” surgery through an incision in the skin. In fact some surgeons don’t do any laparoscopic surgery at all because it involves a whole new skill set which they have not developed.
So I was impressed at this video as a demonstration of skill with the da Vinci robot in the making of an origami crane. It may not look impressive at first until you see the size of the result. But I would argue that it is probably easier with the robot than free hand without the robot. The robot means that every move is smooth and steady, by hand there is far less precision. But still this is awesome and I could really appreciate the difficulty and skill involved.
June 15th, 2008 at 9:26 am
When I was watching it I didn’t think that it was that impressive - that was until the end when I saw the scale of the crane.
Looks like you’ll be out of a job in the future.
June 15th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
@Matt lucky that I don’t do the operating
I am the one that sets up stuff like this and assists as the procedure is carried out - so for me - always a job 
The one thing I can say about Lap surgery is that they make it look very easy - it ain’t.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:47 am
My ex Wife is a Theatre nurse,
I might send her a link to this.
Back in the days where we still liked each other she was living with a workmate. I went round for dinner at their place one night. All went well until they started to talk shop !!
Believe me folks, nothing puts a non medical person off their meatloaf like a detailed discussion about putting ‘k’ wires into hands.
J
June 16th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Oh yeah,
I used to work in the R&D dept of a place that manufactured NC tool grinders. The machines made these cutting tools that looked like fancy drill bits down to a size of about 0.4mm overall diameter. Impressive ? naaah not when you consider that some of the tolerences on those tools were 3 micron or 3/1000th of a millimeter.
The most impressiver thing however was the degree of mechanical prescision (they were built by hand !!) and the 100,000 odd lines of code used to run it !!!
Comissioning them was a nightmare.
the machines had 9 axes it could use including 5 ‘hard’ axes (X,Y,Z,x1 & C) with the remaining 4 being ’soft’ (software) axes which where compound axes made up of 2 or more of the hard axes.
the machine had to be aware of the relative positioning of all of the parts at any given moment so as to prevent collision and to enhance accuracy.
Your davinci machine would have to do at least this.
J
June 16th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Impressive!!