Northern Dutchess Hospital Offers Advanced Robotic Surgery

From Northern Dutchess Hospital: 

Rhinebeck – With traditional operations, surgeons must have an adequate view and access to organs, so they make inches-long incisions that can sometimes be difficult to recover from.

The da Vinci Surgical System, now available at Northern Dutchess Hospital, allows physicians to make delicate incisions and navigate around the tight areas where organs lie. When compared to conventional surgery, robotic surgery may reduce post-operative pain, blood loss, infection risk and scarring. In most cases, patients are able to recover more quickly and resume normal activities.

“Just after opening a $47 million pavilion with a new surgery department, we now offer a whole new level of surgical capabilities,” hospital President Denise George said. “This is a revolutionary approach to minimally invasive surgery that allows surgeons to spare healthy tissues, shorten the patient’s recovery time and decrease surgical pain.”

Northern Dutchess offers da Vinci surgery to perform precise urological, gynecological, colorectal and gastrointestinal procedures. Common robotic surgeries offered include: gall bladder and prostate removal, hernia repair and hysterectomies.

The hospital purchased the newest da Vinci Xi model from California-based Intuitive Surgical Inc., investing $2 million to bring major medical center technology to the local community.

“This cutting-edge technology is rare for a small community hospital, but at Northern Dutchess Hospital size doesn’t stand in the way of excellence,” George said.

Dr. John Choi, a minimally invasive colorectal surgeon on the hospital’s medical staff, only had his own two arms prior to the launch of robotics. Now, he’s got four robotic arms to use – one holds a camera and the other three can grip traditional surgical tools such as scissors, graspers or needle drivers.

During surgery, instead of directly operating, he sits at a high-tech console a few feet away from the patient and looks into a viewfinder, seeing a 3D picture zoomed into the inside of the patient’s body. Underneath the viewfinder is a control that moves the robotic arms in sync with his hand.

“With the surgical robot’s wristed instrumentation, you can move your tools around curves to reach tissues in difficult-to-access areas, which allows you to be gentler on the tissue,” Choi of Health Quest Medical Practice said. ““The da Vinci Xi Surgical System is a game changer.”

For information about the robotic surgical capabilities, visit healthquest.org/roboticsurgery and select “da Vinci Robotic Surgery.”

Courtesy photo caption: Northern Dutchess Hospital’s surgical staff prepare for a procedure to repair a hernia on April 8, 2016, using the hospital’s newly purchased $2 million da Vinci Xi Surgical System shown in the background.