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Imagine doctors seated in a
high-tech hospital in downtown Mumbai performing an angioplasty on a heart
patient who is in a hospital located miles across in the same city or a nearby
mofussil town. Sounds too futuristic? But it is not impossible as new research
done by a team of doctors - including one from 'aamchi' Mumbai - has shown.
For the first time in the
history of cardiology, a mainly Israeli team has shown that a specially
manufactured robotic arm can perform the non-surgical procedure of pushing a
catheter through the groin and fixing a balloon or a stent to clear out
blockages in the heart. Of course, the person operating the arm by using a
joystick is none other than the doctor.
"We first designed the robotic
arm and then used it in a wire glass model and then in a number of sheep to show
that remote-controlled interventions from a distance are possible in
catherisation laboratories," says chief interventionalist cardiologist AV
Ganeshkumar of L H Hiranandani Hospital, Powai. Dr. Ganeshkumar , who joined
Hiranandani Hospital in 2004, was working at Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine
& Rambam Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, when the robotic experiment began in
early 2000 under the leadership of Dr Rafael Beyar. This institute is known for
pioneering work, with two of its scientists receiving the Nobel Prize for
chemistry in 2004.
The successful results in sheep
have been published in the latest edition of the 'EuroIntervention' journal.
What is more interesting is the part 2 of the study which has been accepted for
publication in the prestigious 'Journal of American College of Cardiology' a
pilot study of the use of the robotic arm in 15 persons whose average age was
around 50 years. "We conducted these first-in-man experiments in Bucharest,
Romania, from 2003 onwards," says the 35-year-old Dr Ganeshkumar, who went to
the country twice in 2005 to be with the medical team.
(Ref : The Times of India
dated December 26, 2005)
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