Medical Society Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham PC, KBE ‘Innovation in surgery’
There is no-one more qualified to speak on cutting edge surgery in the UK than Lord Darzi. His team at Imperial College London are currently in the process of creating surgery without any external incisions on the patient. This will hopefully be done using an ‘i-snake’: a robotic tube encasing tiny imaging and surgical equipment which can enter the body by travelling down the patient’s throat and oesophagus and making an incision in the stomach lining. Lord Darzi’s team has also harnessed eyeball tracking technology to allow a camera fixed on a beating heart to move in parallel with the beats so that a surgeon performing heart bypass surgery only sees a motionless heart on the screen.
Lord Darzi also touched on other aspects of his varied and distinguished career, sharing entertaining anecdotes from his two years in the House of Lords. Throughout the evening, he fully engaged with the 170 strong audience. It will be fascinating to see how some of Lord Darzi’s innovations will affect the course of modern surgery.
Monty Lyman OS (JMG)
