JANET BURNS

jburns@antonmediagroup.com

At the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, medical students are getting a chance to familiarize themselves with some of the latest in surgical robotics, and to prepare for advancements in tech still to come.

Over the past several weeks, second-year medical students participating in the school’s Surgical Skills Training Course (SSTC) have been practicing using the school’s da Vinci Surgical System, comprising multiple delicate, 100-percent hand- and human-controlled robotic arms.

The da Vinci system is now used in many hospitals’ operating rooms, where roughly 15 percent of surgeries now involve robotic tools. A recent Hofstra/Northwell release on the program explained, “The military, in a joint effort with the Stanford Research Institute, first developed robot-assisted surgery in the late 1980s, [and the] da Vinci Surgical System became the first robotic device approved by the FDA in 2000. Today, the da Vinci system is an innovative, state-of-the-art advanced instrumentation [that] works as an extension of a skilled surgeon by replicating the surgeon’s hand movements in real-time and aiding with greater visualization, enhanced dexterity, and greater precision.”

Harrison Labban, M.D. Candidate in the Class of 2025 at the Zucker School of Medicine, talked about the experience and implications of training with a surgical robot during a phone interview with Nassau Illustrated News. As someone who’s hoping to pursue surgical residency after med school, the SSTC course has been a key component of his and other would-be surgeons’ curriculum this year.

“The opportunity to work with the da Vinci robot has been really unique, and part of a larger program that is offered to us a second-year students, especially those of us considering surgical