Filthy surgical instruments: a threat in America's operating rooms (2014)

Re:Filthy surgical instruments: a threat in America's operat... by yowlingcat on Saturday August 31, 2019 @11:27PM (#20850329)

Please excuse me if this is an uninformed question, but could this potentially be a use case for robotic/remote controlled surgery? It seems like getting a clean room set up where no humans outside of the patient are present could at least prevent operator in terms of contamination.

Of course, my fear is that the contamination comes more from everything that's not the patient or the surgeon as it pertains to the surgery -- nurses, cleaning staff, etc. Every actor and entity in that chain needs to ensure sterility, so the screws would have to be sealed until opened, the cleaning staff would have to use these kinds of space suits (or clean remotely) and likewise for the nurses. Unless or until this all becomes possible, the whole system is not going to be set up for sterility.

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Re:Filthy surgical instruments: a threat in America's operat... by projektfu on Saturday August 31, 2019 @11:34PM (#20850348)

Surgeries don’t take place in clean rooms. The patients themselves are not clean. The contamination in these cases is coming from previous patients. So, unless you can make a self cleaning and self sterilizing robot, a human will be involved in turning instruments over for the next surgery.

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