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...girl was 11 a child of the streets of Fortaleza, Brazil, whose future seemed as bleak as the slums in which she lived. Then Carla Nisiane Anacleto da Costa saw a ballet performance by students from a dance school called EDISCA, a troupe that included other impoverished girls from her street. EDISCA (the letters stand for the Spanish name of the School of Dance and Social Integration for Children and Adolescents) was not your average ballet company, and this was no Swan Lake. It portrayed Fortaleza's poorest kids begging at traffic lights and living on the street. "That really...
...da Vinci is a descendant of a U.S. Department of Defense project in the 1980s to create a robot that would allow surgeons to operate on critically wounded soldiers from a safe distance, or even perform emergency surgery on astronauts on Mars. The scientists envisioned easily deployed surgical units that would save lives. But while the need for careful setup of the patient and machine and the chaos of trauma surgery have yet to make that possible, non-emergency surgery over great distances is already happening. In 1998 a doctor from Baltimore assisted on a robotic operation in Singapore from...
...point where she couldn't eat at all; she was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Traditional surgery involves an incision from the throat down to the belly button. "It's a very violent operation," says cardiothoracic surgeon Murali Dharan, making a digging motion with his hands. With the da Vinci, Dharan was able to remove Tichtchenko's cancerous esophagus and move her stomach up much higher - to allow her to feed herself minus her swallowing mechanism - through small incisions in her neck. "I'd watched E.R. on TV at home, but I never imagined how fully...
...more difficult surgery, including heart bypasses and heart-valve replacements. These procedures are performed through three incisions, each about the diameter of a pen, instead of cracking open the chest. With a less invasive approach, they promise benefits in patient recovery and lower costs for post-op care. The da Vinci's ability to perform precise movements in tiny spaces - without trembling like a tired surgeon might - could allow better microsurgery, preventing debilitating nerve damage...
Despite the rave reviews, robot-assisted surgery is still in its infancy. While the da Vinci does offer realistic "force feedback," similar to a high-end joystick, it isn't developed to the point where surgeons truly get their valuable sense of "feel." Developing teletaction - long-distance feel - has proven to be a slow process, with current prototypes years away from functioning at a useful level. But surgeons are intrigued by the ability of da Vinci and its closest competitor, Computer Motion's Zeus, to spread knowledge. An expert surgeon could be sitting in his office, watching over the shoulder...