London - Robots have been used to carry out kidney transplants for the first time in the UK.
The machines are controlled by surgeons but computers and precision motors allow greater accuracy, meaning much less painful damage to muscle.
As a result, the man and woman who had the operations at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London were able to recover using only paracetamol rather than morphine.
Siobhan Morris, 42, who underwent the operation a week ago, had previously had a kidney transplant by traditional open surgery, but found the pain with the robotic method was ‘probably 80 percent less’.
‘I was amazed,’ the mother-of-two from Kent told The Sunday Times. ‘They cut through all the muscles before and they didn’t do any of that this time,’ she added. ‘It is so much easier.’
Andy Brooks, 58, who had his transplant the day beforeMorris, said: ‘The post-operative recovery was much shorter than under the conventional transplant.’
A City worker from Sussex, he was given a kidney donated by his wife Tracy, 48, a dance teacher.
He said the day after his operation he was ‘hopping out of bed and walking about’, adding: ‘It was an amazing experience.’
The rapid improvement in robots means they are being trialled in more and more NHS procedures. Just last week a team in Oxford announced they had used a robot to operate on a human eye for the first time.
Until now donated kidneys have been implanted using open surgery.
But using robot arms allows the procedure to be carried out through small slits, or ‘keyholes’, which means less painful cutting and removes human factors such as the surgeon’s pulse that can affect the operation.
Nizam Mamode, consultant transplant surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’, told the newspaper: ‘We have been incredibly impressed with the difference in recovery.’
He said the technology could ‘revolutionise transplantation’.
The operations were carried out with a Da Vinci robot completely controlled by doctors, but others are being developed that could make some surgical decisions.
Daily Mail