Questions and Answers: Robotics

Two of Little Company of Mary Hospital’s pioneers in robotics discuss their backgrounds, how the robot should be assimilated into the hospital system, and what it all means for South Bay residents.

What got you interested in medicine?

 
Ramin Mirhashemi: That’s a very interesting question. Actually I was a double major, biomedical and electrical engineering. So I definitely liked the idea of trying to fix things, but I didn’t really see myself behind a desk. I really wanted to interact with people. Then my grandmother passed away from uterine cancer. So that was the impetus to push me to try to improve patients’ lives. That’s what got me into medicine and eventually into gynecologic oncology.

Garrett Matsunaga: In eighth grade, I tore my ACL wrestling, so I had to go in for surgery and physical therapy, which was about a nine-month ordeal. I got interested in physical therapy, but over the course of time I thought I wanted to do more than physical therapy, maybe orthopedics. I did a lot of orthopedic stuff through college and in med school I rotated through ortho. In my final year of med school, I thought, “I don’t know if I just want to do bones,” so then I looked at other surgical subspecialities to see which fields people were happy in. The two that stood out were ENT and urology. I was more interested in urology; one of the first cases I watched was actually a prostatectomy. Urology is a great field because you take care of children all the way to the elderly. It’s such a broad field, and there are so many different areas that you can specialize in.

 
How long have you been working with the robot?

RM: Since 1999. There were two companies that came out with robotic surgery back in the late ‘90s or early 2000s. There were two robots, the da Vinci and the Zeus. I was a professor at the University of Miami back in the late ‘90s, and we had the Zeus robot, so I had done many robotic procedures with the Zeus. Intuitive Surgical basically bought out the company that made Zeus, combined it and improved on the technology and the da Vinci is what is available now, both nationally and internationally.

GM: Where I trained at UC Irvine, there was one physician who was doing laparoscopy, and while working with him I became very interested in laparoscopy. Shortly thereafter, we got a new chairman of the urology department who did the very first laparoscopic nephrectomy, and the focus of our program changed from open surgery to minimally invasive surgery. Subsequently, we acquired a robot, and one of our open surgeons was converted to robotic prostatectomies. That process developed midway through my residency, so it was just fortuitous timing. I got to do open surgery, but I also got exposed to and trained in laparoscopy and robotics.   Continue »

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