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March 2007
The world's first truly smart robotic micro-drill has
been used in a surgical operation in Birmingham, the United Kingdom. The
surgical drilling robot, developed by Peter Brett from the School of
Engineering & Applied Science at Aston University, does not have to be
programmed or made to work from a computer operated by a human. It is
smart, just knows where to go and what to do, science news website Alpha
Galileo reported on Thursday. The
drill has been tested on patients needing cochlear implants by David
Proops, Ear, Nose and Throat Consultant Surgeon at University Hospital
Birmingham NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust. The
drill, applied to the cochlea, the inner ear hearing organ, is aligned to
the correct place and then drills a hole less than a millimeter in
diameter to enable the cochlear implant to be inserted. This has never
happened in medicine before. Full
Story
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June 2007
If you're a bit squeamish about surgery, you may
want to pass up this opportunity. But if you're curious about what's
involved in CI surgery, or you'd just like to see what the operation is
like, here's your chance! The folks at Tampa General Hospital will be
streaming a live CI operation on July 26 at 4PM ET. You can read the
complete story and sign up for a reminder
here.
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November 2007
Robert Labadie, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues at
Vanderbilt University Medical Center have come up with an image-guided,
minimally invasive approach to cochlear implant surgery they believe will
make it faster, less invasive and more precise. This spring they received a
$3 million, four-year grant from the National Institute on Deafness and
Other Communication Disorders to test their hypothesis. "We envision such a
minimally invasive technique to become the LASIK procedure of the ear," said
Labadie, associate professor of Otolaryngology and Biomedical Engineering.
In order to accurately implant an electrode in the cochlea without damaging
the critical facial nerve, surgeons currently have to excavate a large
section of bone from the lateral skull base, a process that takes
approximately two hours to complete in the operating room with patients
under general anesthesia. Labadie said that with his group's software and
frame design, surgeons will be able to plan a specific trajectory by putting
anchors into the skull, and then having a customized frame built to guide a
drill along a safe path from the lateral skull base to the cochlea. This
process may reduce operating time from hours to minutes, and could eliminate
the need for general anesthesia, he said.
Full Story
