Move over Da Vinci, it’s now time for the Renaissance. Before art connoiseurs take offence, it ought to be made clear that we’re talking about robots involved in complex surgeries. After the Apollo Hospitals group gave robotic surgery in the country a massive fillip by buying and using the Da Vinci Si robots for regular operations, they have brought the Renaissance robotic surgical guidance system to assist in spinal surgeries.
While the Da Vinci, which Apollo operates in four cities in the country is a joystick-guided module which has massive robotic arms that conduct the surgery (a little like Dr Octopus from the Spiderman movies), this robot is roughly the size of a “can of Cola,” says Dr Sajan K Hegde, Head of Apollo’s Spinal Unit and the man who is trained to use it.
So what does it do? For starters, it has helped with corrective spinal surgeries for over 12 people, barely a month after it was brought down to Chennai. The most endearing tale among those helped by this device is that of 10-year-old Heema Kirit Shah from Rajkot.
Born with congenital abnormalities that curved her spine - and effectively her back - her parents have been lugging her to super-speciality hospitals around the country to get it corrected, but to no avail.
“It was a mess really. She had been operated on at least thrice and there were various rods and implants in her back, which had caused the weaker bones to break. Her spine was also badly deformed,” explains Dr Hegde. What she needed was corrective surgery, with doctors re-setting her backbone piece by piece, without damaging her spinal cord - “this could have cause cardio-pulmonary issues or left her paralysed, if we had gone wrong,” he adds.
Normally, this would have been an operation that drained even a super-skilled surgeon, besides having a very low margin of error. But with the Renaissance system guiding the doctors, things were easier and even more accurate. “The machine is fed with all the scans and images and it knows exactly where the screws have to be inserted and which angle it has to be put in. Nerve composition is also factored in, so there’s no damage to her nerves or organs,” says Hegde. Moving much like a little capsule across her back, the robotic guidance system ensured that the screws were inserted into her back sans incident.
Barely three days after, Heema looks as normal as she could have ever looked, without any shadow from her past. “She was very anxious to get back to school looking like this, because she was always looked at like a hunchback,” says her mother. She is shorter than most fifth-graders, the fact that she can finally play like any other kid, is more than she could have asked for.
Buoyed by the success of the device, Apollo Hospitals Group Chairman Dr Prathap C Reddy sanctioned the purchase of four more devices so that many more people could benefit.