What Is Robotic Cardiac Operation? Facts and Uses

To start with all the cardiac operations need a great deal of invasiveness . Most of the cardiac operations like heart bypass surgery , heart valve repair or replacement surgeries , closure of congenital defects , like Atrial septal defect , or heart tumour removal need the breastbone or sternum to be cut open in the middle of the chest to get inside the heart. This is called a standard or conventional cardiac operation or more popularly – an open heart procedure.Usually this procedure is time tested and have been the standard of care for last 3-4 decades. However , as the technology have evolved in the last decade very exponentially , lots of new methods have come in the recent years to minimise the trauma of open heart operations. In the last decade , surgical robotics have really evolved quite rapidly and have emerged as an extremely safe tool to perform cardiac operations.

Why Robots have been used for cardiac operations –

1. To minimise the trauma and pain to the body which in traditional open cut surgery can be quite severe and very long lasting 
2. Precise and extreme accuracy in procedures like valve repair operations where the visualisation of the cardiac structures may become difficult in open procedures
3. Access to the very difficult areas – robotic arms can go to areas where surgeons hand don’t reach – this is specially true for cardiac bypass operations , where surgeons harvest vessels like internal mammary arteries with much more precision and accuracy with very ideal lengths 
4. Duration of surgery , duration of anesthesia becomes much lesser compared to open surgeries and this definitely leads to less stay in the hospital .
5. Blood loss becomes very less and total blood requirement and blood transfusions become very negligible – this in fact reduces so many complications of blood transfusions like infections and allergic reactions 
6. With minimal trauma , the wound infection rate in robotic cardiac operations have really become negligible – this is like boon for all patients , specially for the patients with diabetes, where wound infections become a major health hazard , both for the patient and the doctors team 
7. Scars are really small and are hardly visible – this is specially true for young unmarried girls , wherein a scar in the mid of the chest may render a social taboo on them

Most fascinating facts about Robotic cardiac operations –

1.  Maintain normal physiology of your body – as in Robotic operations we don’t cut open your chest , your bodily defect will not change anything in you – you feel like quite natural , normal and better than before.
2. Functional recovery after robotic cardiac operations is really fascinating as you wont even feel that you have gone through a major cardiac bypass or valve replacement operation.Its all because of minimal invasion , minimal tissue handling and also overall less er invasions .
3. After a robotic cardiac operation , you become independent in 1-2 days and can do most your routine within a weeks time , which is kind of never possible after an open heart conventional heart operation.
4. Very interestingly , you will never feel the psychological impact of a major open heart operation on you – you will always be the same , before and after any robotic cardiac operation .