Read the passage and choose the best answers to the questions. (10 pts)
The development of so-called keyhole surgery means that the surgeon’s knife may soon disappear altogether as it is replaced by miniature cameras, microscopic scissors, and staplers. Instead of making long cuts in the patient’s body, surgeons look at the site through an “endoscope”, or operating telescope. This is passed into the body through a small hole that will barely leave a scar.
As long as the operation is carried out skillfully by an experienced surgeon, keyhole surgery damages the patient far less than a conventional operation. “Minimal access surgery is a real breakthrough,” says Alf Cuschieri, a leading endoscopic surgeon. “I wish we’d developed it years ago. Not only does it reduce the trauma to the patient – but it also means that we no longer have to make major incisions to perform major operations.”
The viewing technology that allows doctors to see what is happening deep inside the human body has been borrowed from the aerospace industry. Although in the 1960s flexible scopes were developed by technicians to check engine interiors without them having to be taken apart, today’s endoscopes are not just simple tubes you can see through; they are equipped with very small television cameras. An image of the operation – magnified eight times – is transmitted by the camera onto a strategically placed TV screen. Doctors and nurses needn’t crowd round to look into the wound. Instead, they keep their eyes on the screen with straight backs and plenty of elbow room. As surgeons cannot work in the dark, light is beamed into the area of the body being operated on through optical fibers – strands of special glass, each as thin as a human hair, through which light travels.
Keyhole surgeons hope that miniaturization will make it possible for patients to have their operations performed by robots small enough to crawl through the patient’s body. Despite the fact that, until now, even the smallest robots have been too large to be exploited in endoscopic surgery, in Massachusetts the Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory is working on ever-smaller miniature and microrobots. These robots could be used for filming, taking biopsy specimens, or on-the-spot analysis.
One of the most exciting future developments involves telesurgery, where doctors will operate by remote control. This means that a patient can be operated on by two surgeons who are hundreds of kilometers away from each other – and from the patient.
Some believe that such techniques will have been perfected in the next ten years or so.
What was the main use of flexible scopes in the 1960s?
