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robotics by Kevin McKeough Feature With a Steady Hand to seal the clip across the cystic artery, the pincer withdraws, then returns to repeat the process further down the blood vessel. Once both clips are in place, a scissors appears and severs the artery in between them. A few yards from the unconscious patient, a three-dimensional video of the procedure plays out on a A 32 | SPRING 2 010 large, flat-screen television hanging from the ceiling. Seated below, fifth-year surgery resident Kendra Grubb, MD, her head and arms buried in a console, is performing the gallbladder removal surgery, handling the con- trols of the pencil-thin robotic instruments and watching her handiwork in 3-D on the console's viewfinder. Except for her blue surgical scrubs, Grubb looks a bit like a teenager in a video arcade, an impression furthered by the steady chirps and beats of the patient monitors that fill the operating room in the University of Illinois Medical Center. Standing alongside Grubb, Pier Christoforo Giulianotti, MD, monitors her progress on the screen above, his dark-tinted 3-D glasses giving him an air of movie star cool. During the course of the surgery, Giulianotti, the Lloyd M. Nyhus Professor of Surgery and chief of general, minimally invasive and robotic surgery, coaches Grubb in the fine points of the procedure, offering suggestions about ways of retracting the gallbladder and obtaining a better view of the patient's anatomy. The University of Illinois Medical Center has the largest general and thoracic robotic surgery program in the world, an endeavor that has pioneered numerous advanced procedures. The program is also an international leader in education, one of only a few academic medical centers in the country to have a robotics training lab. The American College of Surgeons has asked the Illinois Medicine program to develop a robotic surgery curricu- lum for other residency programs nationwide, and in the last two years, almost 300 surgeons from around the world have come to the medical center to receive robotic surgery training. "These tools can be moved in a microscopic way, with even more possibilities than the human hand," Giulianotti says. "Robotics is the future of surgery. We need to prepare more surgeons in this technique." A leader in robotic surgery, Illinois Medicine is passing on that knowledge to its residents and to physicians worldwide pincer navigates the space between a 30-year-old woman's gallbladder and liver, its alligator jaws opened wide to hold a white clip. Snapping shut PHOTO: LLOYD DEGRANE