Roger Suter says he had no idea what was happening to him. Chest pains? He thought he had bronchitis.
He says he was floored -- "pretty bummed" -- when the doctor told him he needed multiple bypass surgery.
Coronary bypass is a common operation in America, but a drastic one, too. To reach the heart and replace the blocked blood vessels that supply it, surgeons literally have to break open one's breastbone.
But at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, doctors have been trying an alternative: a system known as da Vinci. Instead of opening a patient's chest, they make a few small incisions to insert tiny robot arms.
"There's a lot of invasion that goes along with traditional heart surgery," says Dr. Robert Poston, who helped pioneer robotic bypass surgery at Maryland, and has recently become Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Boston Medical Center. "If you can avoid all that, and go in between the ribs, not crack any bones, then that is one less thing you have to heal up."
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