2024-02-27 06:30:00
It’s difficult to send a specialist surgeon to urgently carry out an operation in space… But he might guide the operations from his office on Earth! Virtual Incision Corporation, a company based in Nebraska (United States), placed one of its robot surgeons in a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS) at the end of January. Objective: not to provide possible help to astronauts (it is still too early), but to assess the impact of weightlessness during the execution of surgical tasks simulated by the robot.
Much smaller than the equipment currently marketed by the company, the Mira robot surgeon has “the potential to make remote surgery more feasible by enabling transportation, storage and setup time on an unprecedented scale,” enthuses the Virtual Incision Corporation team. Designed for abdominal procedures, it will be remotely controlled by a surgeon who will direct its movements.
A test was carried out from the company’s headquarters, with the machine present on the ISS. Despite a delay of 0.85 seconds between Earth and the ISS, fabric grabbing, manipulation and cutting operations were carried out. The data collected must now be compared to those from operations carried out on Earth.
A deployment planned in medical deserts
Transportable in any operating room, with a size close to that of a microwave, the robot must be able to easily deploy. An ease of installation on which its manufacturer is not (yet) counting for commercial growth in space, but on Earth, to respond to the challenge of medical deserts. In the United States, a third of counties currently do not have access to a surgeon locally, while the shortage of surgeons might reach more than 30,000 people within ten years.
A prospect that attracts investors: Virtual Incision Corporation has raised nearly $80 million since November 2021. The ISS program is for its part financed with the help of a grant awarded by NASA to the University of Nebraska. For the moment, Mira remains an experimental device and is not available for sale. Numerous surgical operations, using conventional equipment, had already been carried out in the past on the ISS.
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