NYU Langone performs first-ever robotic double lung transplant
New York University Langone successfully performed the world’s first robotic double lung transplant last October 22.
Yahoo News says John Hopkins University and Stanford University researchers trained a Da Vinci Xi Surgical System robot to prepare for the procedure.
As a result, their method verifies a new way to streamline surgical robot training, marking a significant milestone in robotic medicine.
Article continues after this advertisementHow did the researchers train the robot?
The researchers trained the surgical bot in three basic activities: suturing, tissue lifting, and needle handling.
Also, they combined kinematic data with sophisticated language models to create a training model for the robot.
In other words, they merged data that mathematically represents robotic motion with AI models to enable Da Vinci to learn.
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It watched surgical videos via its wrist-mounted cameras. Moreover, researchers overcame the bot’s input accuracies by focusing on relative movements instead of precise actions.
This adjustment boosted its precision and adaptability, letting the bot act in new environments and tasks.
For example, it can recover a dropped needle during surgery.
Once it was ready, Stephanie H. Chang, MD, and her team used it for Cheryl Mehrkar’s lung transplant on October 22, 2024.
Dr. Chang is the surgical director of the Lung Transplant Program at the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.
The NYU Langone website reports she and her team used the Da Vinci Xi robot at each stage of the procedure.
They made small incisions between the ribs. Then, they used the robot to remove the lungs and prepare the surgical site for the transplant.
Afterward, they implanted both lungs using robotic techniques.
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The 57-year-old woman with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) thanked NYU Langone Health for the operation’s success.
“I’m so grateful to the doctors and nurses here for giving me hope,” Mehrkar said.
Dr. Chang celebrated the robotic lung transplant’s success:
“By using these robotic systems, we aim to reduce the impact this major surgery has on patients, limit their postoperative pain, and give them the best possible outcome.”
“It couldn’t happen here without a talented group of surgeons and an institution dedicated to moving transplantation forward.”
