In recent years, robotic surgeons have been making headlines in the news and increasingly purchased for operating rooms around the world. They have many advantages, but a group of researchers from Japan decided to find out if these robots are safe from the point of view of sterility? As it turned out, not really.
In the course of their research, scientists found that it was impossible to completely disinfect the entire robot. If ordinary surgical instruments can be safely put in a sterilization cabinet, then you cannot put a huge robot in such a cabinet and you have to be content with only external processing.
The results of the experiment indicate that at the moment there is a fairly high risk of infection, including quite dangerous strains of microorganisms. For almost two years (and to be precise, 21 months), the Japanese have thoroughly studied 132 robotic surgeons. Inoculations of bacteria were taken as samples from the surface of both the robot itself and the working tools of the machines. Crops were taken immediately after surgery and after the standard three-level cleaning procedure.
In parallel, the sterility of conventional surgical instruments in sterilization cabinets was investigated. Based on the results of the experiments, it was revealed that if the standard instruments were almost 100% sterile, then the robots were sterile only 90-97%, which is a rather serious indicator and can lead to intraoperative infection of patients, as well as cause various postoperative complications from a long rehabilitation the period before the development of infectious pathology.
VLADIMIR KUZNETSOV