Essentia Health -St. Joseph's has a new surgeon on staff-one that gets turned on and off with each surgery.

Essentia Health put down $2 million dollars to buy the new da Vinci Xi surgical robot, of which $800,000 came from the St. Joseph's Foundation.

Dr. Troy Duininck, Essentia Health chief of surgery, said the robot is usually used for hernia and other bowel surgeries-and it slices patient recovery times along with surgical incisions.

It's not an autonomous robot, like something out of Blade Runner or the Jetsons. The da Vinci still needs a human to function in surgery. It's more analogous to a remote-controlled drone zooming around.

But it does allow Duininck to sit in one corner of the room, a few yards away from the patient, while he performs the surgery. He controls the action by sticking his face into a headrest where he looks down at a monitor that displays a 3D camera's rendering of the operating table. He can control the arms (there are several, like an octopus) by using joystick controls. These controls have a wider range of motion than the human hands that manipulate them. The da Vinci has a slightly Orwellian aspect in that Duininck's voice booms over the room's intercom system via a microphone near the headrest.

However, the results of the da Vinci on patient recovery times are anything but menacing.

"What we're finding is that patients have less pain after a robotic operation versus an open operations," Duininck said.

And because patients have less pain, that means they're qualified to leave the hospital sooner, Duininck said.

In addition, the robot allows him to do something akin to laparoscopic surgery, also known as "lap," where the surgeon makes a small incision, and the surgery itself is performed within the abdominal wall. He can do it in cases where otherwise an "open" surgery, or surgery with large incisions that involves sticking a surgeon's hand into the body, may have been necessary. Robotic and laparoscopic surgeries are much less invasive since they don't require slicing open the abdominal wall-in more graphic terms, eviscerating a patient.

The da Vinci robot allows Duininck to do surgeries that are even beyond laparoscopic: procedures that are "surgical" in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word.

"I've done some very difficult hernia operations robotically, which I would not have been able to do laparoscopically," he said. "The operations were complex enough that laparoscopic surgery would not have been an option. But because of the functions of the robot, because of the fact that you can maneuver the instruments kind of like your wrist ... because the visualization is much better,-you have a three-dimensional view-and because you can manipulate the camera along with the instruments all together, that allows you to do things you wouldn't be able to do laparoscopically."

When da Vinci Xi the model was first released in 2014, its manufacturer Intuitive Surgical also touted the three-dimensional view.

"As with all da Vinci Surgical Systems, the da Vinci Xi System's immersive 3D-HD vision system provides surgeons a highly magnified view, virtually extending their eyes and hands into the patient," a release said.

At Essentia-Joseph's, the robot is not used for emergency surgeries, although some hospitals do employ robots in the emergency setting, Duininck said. Essentia-St. Joseph reserves da Vinci specifically for non-emergency surgeries because any given surgeon who is on call may not necessarily be fluent in using it, he said. The robot isn't also necessarily primed to be ready at a moment's notice, so it would cause a delay in an emergency while it was set up, he added. Another reason is that emergency surgeries typically require open surgery anyway, due to severe trauma.

Duininck was interested to see what new surgery robots are released by tech companies as they compete. According to the Mayo Clinic, the first robot surgery models received approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2000. Less than two decades later, the Mayo Clinic now has nine robot units assisting surgery, Duininck said.

"The robotic platform is here to stay," he said. "It's only going to grow."