Machines monitoring an elderly man’s vital signs emit steady beeps while a surgeon uses one arm to grasp a dissector and deftly peel layers of tissue from the patient’s cancerous bladder. Another arm snips at the base of the fleshy organ with a steel claw while a third manipulates a tiny camera that sends gorgeous images of glistening innards onto video screens all around the darkened room.
….The eerily precise and silent surgeon hovering over the Madison patient last month in a UW Hospital operating room was a robot named da Vinci, after Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th century Italian genius who made sketches and then a wooden model of the world’s first human robot. Modern-day da Vincis have revolutionized the surgical world in the past few years, achieving a level of precision and visibility that once would have been unimaginable.