Robots don't perform the surgeries, but they are tools that give the surgeon more dexterity. They let you get into confined spaces. You can eliminate hand tremor, and you can be very precise and delicate. It's as if the tips of the instruments become your fingertips.

Robots don't perform the surgeries, but they are tools that give the surgeon more dexterity.

Conventional surgical robots are the equivalent of a sophisticated racecar compared to your basic family sedan.

If you have cancer of the stomach, doctors would go in with the instrument and remove that area of tissue. Another possible application is fixing reflux disease. A new area that doctors are pursuing is trans-gastric surgery, where you go into the mouth, enter the stomach, make an incision in the stomach wall and then into the abdominal cavity. Once you are in the abdominal cavity, you can remove someone's gall bladder, for example. Because you gain entry through the mouth, there is no scar.

With interventional radiology, doctors will use real-time X-rays, called fluoroscopy, to see what the probe is doing inside the patient. Surgeons will be able to enter an artery near the groin area and navigate through arteries and into the heart, brain, to other major organs, snaking all through the venous system to perform surgeries in those areas of the body.

These remotely controlled in vivo robots provide the surgeon with an enhanced field of view from arbitrary angles, as well as provide dexterous manipulators not constrained by small incisions in the abdominal wall.