Surgery just got smaller (Image: CP Canadian Press/The Canadian Press/Press Association Images) The ophthalmic robot seen here on a chick retina, is designed to treat blocked veins in the eye (Image: ETH Zurich) ViRob crawls along inside the body using its vibrating legs. It could be used to deliver drugs or medical devices to specific sites.

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Sci-fi surgery

Editorial: Getting to the heart of robotic surgery

Gallery: The sci-fi future of surgery

A MAN lies comatose on an operating table. The enormous spider that hangs above him has plunged four appendages into his belly. The spider, made of white steel, probes around inside the man’s abdomen then withdraws one of its arms. Held in the machine’s claw is a neatly sealed bag containing a scrap of bloody tissue.

This is a da Vinci robot. It has allowed a surgeon, sitting at a control desk, to remove the patient’s prostate gland in a manner that has several advantages over conventional methods. Yet the future of robotic surgery may lie not only with these hulking beasts but also with devices at the other end of the size spectrum. The surgeons of tomorrow will include tiny robots that enter our bodies and do their work from the inside, with no need to open patients up or knock them out. While nanobots that swim through the blood are still in the realm of fantasy, several groups are developing devices a few millimetres in size. The first generation of “mini-medibots” may infiltrate our bodies through our ears, eyes and lungs, to deliver drugs, take tissue samples or install medical devices.

The engineering challenges are …