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Previous Volume 354:2099-2101 May 18, 2006 Number 20 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Back in the 1980s, the rationale for building a surgical robot was the stuff of science fiction. Intent on providing "a doctor in every foxhole," military strategists envisioned a severely wounded soldier being loaded into a battlefield ambulance equipped with a robot so that a surgeon at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH unit, miles away could perform life-saving telesurgery to prevent exsanguination or some other physiological catastrophe. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration had a similar vision. A terrestrial physician would be able to remove an acutely inflamed appendix from a patient aboard a robot-equipped space station. In . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Berlinger is an otolaryngologist and a fellow in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis.

An interview with Dr. Lawrence Cohn, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, can be heard at www.nejm.org.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Ota, T., Degani, A., Schwartzman, D., Zubiate, B., McGarvey, J., Choset, H., Zenati, M. A. (2009). A Highly Articulated Robotic Surgical System for Minimally Invasive Surgery. Ann. Thorac. Surg. 87: 1253-1256 [Abstract] [Full Text]  
• Tonks, A. (2006). What's new in the other general journals.. BMJ 332: 1264-1265 [Full Text]