One day, Alexander Cumming can tell his friends that a robot operated on him when he was 2. Alexander's congenital heart defect was repaired last week by Dr. Michael Black, chief of cardiac surgery at Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, with the help of a robot named Aesop. The robot is simple, just a black plastic arm with a fiber-optic camera on a rod thinner than a swizzle stick. It obeys Black's voice commands, sees things Black can't and transmits images to a video monitor. This enhanced view allows Black to perform open-heart surgery on children and infants through an almost unbelievably small incision.
Some kids go home the same day they have surgery.
And it leaves a tiny scar, no small matter for a child. Scars grow as children grow. Surgeons around the United States are using Aesop, which was the world's first robot approved by the Food and Drug Administration for surgery. But Black is one of just a few surgeons in the world using robotics regularly on children. And Aesop is only the first step.