Robotics Team Works with "Robot" Surgeon
For the 2023 BEST Robotics competition, called "Incision Decision", members of the Robotics team visited Magnolia Regional Hospital to learn about robot-assisted surgery.
On October 27th, marketing team members Andrea Sappington, Spencer Arnold, Dylan Lerner and Samuel Maxedon were given the opportunity to see how the da Vinci 4 Robot works. Hospital Coordinator Traci Johnson arranged for the students to meet with the robot's sales rep, a surgical nurse and surgical assistant.
The four students scrubbed out as they would for a real surgery, and entered the operating room where they learned about the history of the da Vinci robot - how it works, its' evolution, its' monitoring system, success rates and more. The surgical nurse and assistant explained their roles, as well as that of the surgeon, during an actual surgery. Students were then given the chance to attempt to suture an opening on a training mock incision. They gained invaluable information from the sales rep about marketing their own robot for the BEST competition.
For the 2023 competition, students were required to build a robot to complete multiple surgeries on a SIMBODY course laid out by the BEST national team. The surgical procedures the robot should perform are heart ablation, heart valve replacement, fault heart valve removal, brain biopsy (autonomously), arterial plaque removal, coronary artery bypass, pacemaker repair, vein harvesting, cardiac angioplasty, and internal hemorrhaging damage control