A Melbourne hospital has become the first in the southern hemisphere to successfully complete operations with the next generation of microsurgery robotics.
The machine, called Symani, recently arrived at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne.
Geoff Rohde, who needed cancer cut out of his thigh and a skin transplant, put his hand up to be the first Australian to go under its tiny knives.
“My recovery, in my mind, has been incredible,” the 71-year-old said.
“I haven’t had a panadol since I left the hospital.”
The grandfather of four spoke to 9News just weeks after his surgery, thrilled to be back in his garden and walking again.
“Bring on the robots,” Geoff joked, sitting beside the smallest surgical instruments in Australia, attached to mechanical wrists.
Dr Eldon Mah sat beside him at the controls.
His chair, which could easily be mistaken for an office swivel chair if it wasn’t white with cables extending from either side, has everything the plastic surgeon needed to successfully complete Geoff’s surgery and nine others since.
Each controller looks like a cross between a large pen, a pair of tweezers, and a Wii remote.
With one in each hand, Dr Mah’s movements are scaled down by up to 20 times.
That means if he moves his hand one centimetre, the corresponding arm moves half of one millimetre.
When combined with a 3D microscope, he’s able to accurately operate without any tremor on blood vessels less than one millimetre wide, by naturally rolling and rotating his wrists and pinching his fingers together.
“It really pushes the boundary of a surgeon’s physical limitations,” said Dr Mah excitedly.
“It can allow me to do things that I personally find really hard to do or impossible to do.”
“There’s a lot of potential here and we find ourselves trying to hold ourselves back.”
Stitching blood vessels together, like in Geoff’s skin transplant, has been one area of focus for Dr Mah’s use of the Symani to date.
It’s currently most useful for operations on the head and neck, removing sarcoma, breast cancers and trauma cases.
But the senior surgeon is already dreaming of using the technology to improve hand surgery, nerve reconstruction, vascular diseases and lymphedema.
“This is the future and this is the beginning of a whole lot of changes to the way we do reconstructive microsurgeries,” explained Dr Mah.
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“We’re the first in Australia and we’re really leading the way in bringing this technology into practice.”
“We’re hoping to double the number next year or triple the number of surgeons trained next year (at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne).”
“Hopefully, with the help of this machine, I can look into different problems that we don’t currently have solutions for.”
According to the hospital, there are only 21 machines of its kind operating on real patients anywhere in the world.
As more come online, Geoff – who is now cancer free – hopes more patients in Victoria’s public hospital system, get access to cutting-edge technology, and enjoy the same results he has.
“When we got that news, both my wife and I cried.”
“I keep saying, where are we going to be in 10 years?”