Scientific advancements are making the prognosis for cancer sufferers better and better all the time. The latest development is of particular interest to prostate cancer sufferers, and comes in the form of a robot that can do more accurate prostate biopsies than any specialist.
This gadget, designed to improve the long-term wellness of prostate cancer sufferers, has been ten years in the making and is named ISRobot Mona Lisa. It has been developed by Biobot Surgical, alongside doctors at Singapore General Hospital. It will be launched in Singapore and spread to South-east Asia around the middle of next year. Assuming that there are positive results for the wellbeing of these early patients, the robot will then become available in Euroope and the United States.
The robot allows the needle for a prostate biopsy to be inserted through the skin, as opposed to the traditional method where doctors insert a needle into the rectum. This means that the chances of infection from the procedure are significantly lowered when tissue is extracted in this manner. This is because the perineum, where the robot places the needle, is a far ‘cleaner’ area than the rectum.
In addition to making the procedure safer, the robot can also detect cancer far more accurately than the machines which are currently used for this purpose. Current machinery has a 30 percent chance of providing a false negative, leading cancer to go undetected, which can be extremely harmful for patients’ long-term prognosis. This was tested by taking a group of 450 patients who had had a’ false negative’ from the old type of machinery and using the robot to test them again for cancer. In 40 percent of these cases, the robot detected the cancer that the original test had failed to find.
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