Operationsroboter in Aktion

For a short period during the 1990s, robots seemed to conquer the operating rooms in North America, Asia and Europe, notably in Germany. In her doctoral dissertation on ‘Operation Robots in Action’, Catarina Caetano da Rosa analyses how robot-assisted surgery came into action and why the project fell apart around 2003. The story of operation robots for hip and knee replacement can be fairly briefly summarized: in 1984, Howard A. Paul and William L. Bargar from the UC Davis School of Medicine developed the idea of using a highly precise robotic and computer system to hollow out the femur for the attachment of a high-tech prosthesis. The first prototype, called Robodoc, was ready in 1987. IBM was the main financer of the project and promoted the company established in October 1990 by Paul and Bargar, Integrated Surgical Systems (ISS). In the same year Robodoc was used for dog surgery; two years later the first successful surgery on a patient was performed. But investigative testing by the Food and Drug Administration took so long that ISS decided to market the operation robot initially in Europe, especially in Germany where safety testing was less strict. Around 1995 Friedrich Frank Hennig from the department of trauma surgery at the university hospital in Erlangen, together with physicist Willi A. Kalender and representatives of Maquet, a company for surgical workplaces, travelled to Sacramento for talks with ISS. They decided to establish their own company and in August 1997 founded a subsidiary called ‘orto Maquet Orthopaedics Solutions’. The technical manufacture of the robot, which was dubbed CASPAR (Computer Assisted Surgical Planning And Robotics), took place at the Institute for Medical Physics at Erlangen University. Following laboratory tests and experiments with dead bodies, the first surgery was performed in November 1997. The next year CASPAR was ready to go into production. At the beginning of the new century Robodoc and CASPAR were widely used for hip and knee replacements in German hospitals. But neither CASPAR nor Robodoc were really profitable. In April 2001 orto Maquet went bankrupt; the successor, Universal Robot Systems, went bankrupt in January 2003. That same month the news of complications and fatal operations—some patients suffered from Trendelenburg gait after the operation, possibly because muscles were peeled off the femur—was spread through an article in Der Spiegel . The phrase ‘deboned’ ( ausgebeint ) was used in the headline, which deeply discredited robot-assisted surgery. The most affected trauma clinic, in Frankfurt am Main, stopped the use of operation robots in spring 2004. ISS had to declare bankruptcy in 2005.

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