Helsinki Uusimaa Hospital District introduces robot-assisted surgery in Meilahti Hospital

New procedure speeds patient recovery

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The Meilahti Hospital in Helsinki entered a new era on Tuesday, when the EUR 1.6 million Da Vinci surgical robot recently acquired by the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) was used for the first time in a real operation.
      The robot’s first patient was a 67-year-old man, whose prostate gland was removed. The operation was performed by professor Peter Wiklund from Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital, who already has a thousand robot-assisted operations under his belt.
      Tuesday’s second robot-aided operation was carried out by HUS urologist docent Antti Rannikko.
      HUS operative profit unit head Reijo Haapiainen considers the transition to robot-aided operations a revolutionary turning-point in the field of precision surgery.
      “In an operation there is less bleeding, the operation time is shorter, the patient recovers more speedily, and the risk of complications is lower”, Haapiainen lists the benefits gained from using a surgical robot.
      Within HUS the plan is to centralise prostate removals to the Meilahti unit.
     
Robots can also be used to perform many other precision-surgical operations, such as heart surgery on children, or brain surgery tasks.
      According to Haapiainen, there are already more than a thousand surgical robots in the world. Because of the apparatus’s hefty price-tag, Finland has been lagging behind in this development. The HUS device is only the second one of its kind in Finland. In Tampere, robot-assisted operations commenced in December.
      In purchasing the HUS equipment, Finland’s prostate cancer patients' support group ERSY (Eturauhassyöpäpotilaiden tuki ry) has been of great help. ERSY’s Da Vinci fundraising project is still open.
      HUS operative profit unit chief surgeon Caj Haglund emphasises that the robot does not operate independently, but rather its instruments are manoeuvred by a surgeon with the help of a three-dimensional monitor image.
     
In preparation for the operation, some keyhole incisions are made to the patient, through which the remote-controlled special instruments are passed to provide a camera-image of the operation area and to perform the surgery.
      The camera lens is around a centimetre wide. It magnifies the image of the area under surgery ten times. The actual operating instrument can be only a few millimetres thick.
     
The use of a robot enables millimetre-precise surgical procedures. This is because the robot transforms the scale of the operating surgeon’s hand movements to the minimum dimensions required by microsurgery.
      Haapiainen estimates that for example in prostate operations the use of a robot cuts the operating time to a third.
      The Tuesday operation took 2.5 hours in all. This is because as a safety measure some lymph follicles and nerves were also removed.


Links:
  Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS)
  Robotic surgery (Wikipedia)
  Da Vinci Surgical System (Wikipedia)

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