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I was a young boy when I saw Fantastic Voyage (1966 – it is available on YouTube, of course!), a movie showing the attempt to save the life of a scientist that had crucial secrets and was incapacitated by a blood clot in the brain. In the movie a team of rescue-surgeons got miniaturised, boarded a micro submarine and travelled inside the blood vessels of the scientist to reach the blood clot in the brain and remove it.
It was pure science fiction, not even 1% of science was there.
Well, it turns out that technology has now progressed to a point where a Fantastic Voyage, although in a virtual space, can become “real”.
This is what is being discussed this week, on December 16th, at the MIT – you can follow the webinar by registering here.
Vicarious Surgical, a US company specialised on robots for healthcare, surgery in particular, will be demonstrating their new system, a system that through virtual reality let a surgeon step inside a patient body along with a micro-robot (this one really inserted in the patient blood vessels) to see what the robot is “seeing” and manipulate the tissues around by instructing the robot actions, as if she were sitting in the robot “head”.
If it is not a Fantastic Voyage it comes really close, with the great advantage that this one is real! For sure I will be joining the webinar and watch this re-edition of that movie amazed of the twist of science fiction into science in just 60 years.
