Riverhead hospital gets new surgical robot

In some ways, the new robot being used by surgeons at Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead can do more than humans.

It has four arms. It sees better. And its hands rotate 360 degrees.

While many operations will take a little longer using the machine, there is far less blood loss and trauma at the incision site, so patients who would normally spend a week in the hospital after surgery now are usually out in just two or three days.

Peconic Bay is the only community hospital on Long Island to use the robotic system, said Andrew Mitchell, the hospital's president and chief executive. The only other one in Suffolk is at Stony Brook University Medical Center, he said.

Surgeons who operate the robot, called a da Vinci unit, put their fingers in Velcro pads and use a video feed to see what they're doing. The robot even corrects for hand tremors, making surgical accidents less likely.

"We'll really have to name him. Or her," said Dr. B. Hannah Ortiz, a gynecological oncologist and director of the hospital's gynecological oncology robot surgery program.

More than a dozen surgical tools can be linked to the robot's arms, and with two separate cameras, one for each eye, the image Ortiz sees when at the controls is three-dimensional.

There is even a feedback program so that the doctor's hands feel the same sensations she would have while operating with the robot.

Ortiz first trained on the da Vinci system in Florida and recently showed a crowd how easily she could tie surgical knots with it.

The first patient operated on in Riverhead with the robot was Denise Sears, 39, of Holtsville, who had a hysterectomy in early May. Nine days after the surgery, she said, "I'm doing everything."

Sears, a nursing assistant, said she researched robotic surgery before deciding to become the first patient to use it at Peconic Bay Medical Center.

"I had surgery in the past, and it was really horrible . . . but Dr. Ortiz is highly intelligent, and she is really, really trustworthy," she said.

Mitchell said NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center will train his staff to use the $1 million machine, and that 50 to 100 surgeries are likely to be performed with it this year.

Mitchell said that, when the training is completed, the hospital will likely be able to perform more surgeries because postoperative patients will be able to leave sooner.