Doctors in Britain have successfully performed the world's first robotic eye surgery.
As per a report in iTV news, the person who had undergone this surgery is Father William Beaver, 70, an associate priest at St Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford, who said that his eyesight was returning following the pioneering procedure.
The Oxford priest had been complaining of distorted vision, which he said felt like “looking in a hall of mirrors at a fairground”.
This robotic operation was carried out at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital.
Father Beaver told BBC Breakfast, 'I was completely relaxed and completely comfortable because I could see that all the technology was in place and all the goodwill was in place and all the skills were in place.
'Because, you see, the key is the precision. The pulse coursing through the hand of the surgeon could have ruined it, could have given me a haemorrhage and this just made it, well, simple,' he added.
This surgery has made way for such treatments in the future.
Professor Robert MacLaren, one of the surgeons told Daily Mail, "There is no doubt in my mind that we have just witnessed a vision of eye surgery in the future."
“Current technology with laser scanners and microscopes allows us to monitor retinal diseases at the microscopic level, but the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can operate on.
MacLaren added, “With a robotic system, we open up a whole new chapter of eye operations that currently cannot be performed.”
The Daily Mail further reported that the surgeons used a joystick outside the eye to control the robot while monitoring its progress through the operating microscope. This gave medics a notable advantage as significant movements of the joystick resulted in tiny movements of the robot.
This is the first time a device has been available that achieves the three-dimensional precision required to operate inside the human eye.
Experts told media, that this will lead to use of robot in retinal gene therapy, a new treatment for blindness which is currently being tried in a number of centres around the world.
