da vinci

Robotics and surgery continue to intertwine with new research coming out of the Imperial College London. Computer scientists there have been improving upon the already tremendously sophisticated Da Vinci surgical robot. Currently, to operate the machine, a surgeon sits in a console from which she peers into the patient through a fiber optic camera. She manipulates the finely-tuned arms of the device with a set of fingertip controls. What the researchers are adding to the system is an attachment which can track the surgeons eye movements and present a three-dimensional map of the area of the patient at which the surgeon is looking. It does this by combining live imagery with a collection of scans of the patient taken prior to the surgery.