IMAGINE you need heart surgery. If you are offered minimally invasive keyhole surgery or a standard operation that involves cracking open your ribcage, the choice might seem obvious. But what if the keyhole surgery is to be performed by a robot?
As robot-assisted techniques proliferate, it is a choice we will face more and more. Every few months, it seems, another surgical first is proclaimed as yet another type of operation falls under the robots’ remit. Tens of thousands of people around the world have already gone under the robot’s knife to have anything from kidney stone removal to lung…
