Current open heart surgery techniques require surgeons to stop the heart for prolonged periods of time in order to operate. A new system being developed in France will enable surgeons to use a robot to operate on a still-beating heart, which may lead to improved recovery times and mitigate some of the side-effects associated with the use of a heart-lung machine:
That impressive development comes courtesy of a group of researchers at France’s Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics, and centers on a new 3D modeling system that can track the motion of the heart’s surface as it beats. It can even apparently adjust for things like movement of the patient’s chest wall during breathing, and predict the movements in a single step (unlike previous attempts that resulted in a delay). When paired with a robotic arm, the system would effectively let surgeons operate on a heart as if it were completely still.
(Via Engadget)