Surgeon Stephen Noble sat at a console a few feet away from the operating table, his head inside a viewing box that displayed a three-dimensional image of a patient’s chest.
With his hands on two controllers, four robotic arms moved in tandem on the other side of the room. Each arm slipped through a port no wider than a fingertip to reach a tumor deep inside the lung.
This is what lung-cancer surgery looks like with the new Da Vinci 5, the latest robotic platform now in use at Chesapeake Regional Health — the first hospital in Hampton Roads to bring the fifth-generation system into the operating room.
“It really allows us to do things in such a way that we can remove a portion of their lung or a whole lung with very small incisions, which really translates into a return to their normal activities, a shorter length of stay in the hospitalization,” Noble said…