Robot hot among surgeons but FDA taking fresh look

In this March 22, 2013 photo, Dr. Pier Giulianotti, chief of minimally invasive and robotic surgery at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System in Chicago, sits at the control panel of the da Vinci robot system. Surgeons say the advantages of the system include allowing them to operate sitting down, using small robotic hands with no tremor. But critics say a big increase in robot operations nationwide is due to heavy marketing and hype, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is looking into problems and deaths that may be linked with robotic surgery. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)CHICAGO (AP) — The biggest thing in operating rooms these days is a million-dollar, multi-armed robot named da Vinci, used in nearly 400,000 surgeries nationwide last year — triple the number just four years earlier.


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