Robot helps heart surgeons on Spanish teens

Robot-assisted surgery has helped doctors carry out life-changing heart operations on two teenagers in Spain, marking the first time robotic heart surgery has been done on children in the country.

In a four-hour operation, a robot was used to help surgeons put a camera inside the heart of a 13-year-old girl by making four 8-millimeter holes in her chest.

The girl had a twisted spine that made her heart difficult to access, making the robot's assistance invaluable.

The operation allowed surgeons to correct two problems: one in which her heart chambers needed to be separated, and another where her heart valve needed to be repaired.

A robot was also used to operate on a 15-year-old boy who had developed a dangerous infection of his heart.

The operations were done at a new unit based at two hospitals in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalonia region. The unit aims to treat patients from birth right through to becoming adults, with a focus on congenital heart disease — heart problems that children are born with.

In Catalonia, 600 children are born with congenital heart disease every year.

The unit has already performed heart surgery on five children. The other three involved thoracoscopic surgery, which uses tiny cameras to see inside the chest, eliminating the need for open heart surgery, which would have led to longer recovery times and worse scarring.

Until now, Spanish children with congenital heart problems have only been operated on using open heart surgery.

Both of the new unit's hospitals have been adding surgical robots to their capabilities over the last several years. But Daniel Pereda, the unit's director, said that whether robotic surgery can be used depends on how young and small a child is, since the tools are designed for adults.

One of the unit's two hospitals, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, had already been using robots with children in other ways, using them as companions for young patients, and even letting young children drive a robot car to their surgery to help them feel more relaxed before it begins.