New Snake Robots Are Future of Surgery

The shape of medicine to come has been revealed - and it looks a lot like a snake! 

Doctors in the US have revealed the latest instruments they can use for operations are tiny snake-shaped robotic instruments that are armed with sharp tools and scissors and are capable of coiling their way through the human body. 

The snakes are already being used to perform heart, prostate cancer and other organ operations. 

At the moment the ‘snakebots’ as they are referred to, are attached to a control box, but in future they will be operated wirelessly and move freely around the body, it’s predicted. 

‘It won't be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning they will actually be inside the body without tethers,’ said Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York where the snakebots have been trialled. 

Argenziano is a pioneer in this kind of advanced surgery was involved with some of the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration clinical trials on robotic heart surgery more than a decade ago. He reckons robots will give surgeons a whole new world of possibilities.

‘It's like the ability to have little hands inside the patients, as if the surgeon had been shrunken, and was working on the heart valve,’ he said. 

While some may worry that their health may soon lay in the hands of cyborgs, Argenziano thinks the opposite. He says the robots will enhance rather than take away from the traditional role of the surgeon in performing complex surgery. 

‘The robot is a tool. It is no different in that sense than a scalpel. It's really a master-slave device,’ he said.