Surgeon Uses Robot to Save Woman's Uterus

Oct. 4, 2002 -- Joanne Ulrich couldn't wait to give birth to her first baby, until a routine prenatal checkup indicated something was wrong.

"On my first visit to the doctor's I was three months pregnant," Ulrich told ABCNEWS' Dr. Nancy Snyderman on Good Morning America. "At that time they said are you sure on your due date because you're measuring a month further and they thought I was carrying twins at the time and I said well it may be that I do have fibroid tumors."

Ulrich, who appeared further along in her pregnancy due to the size of the tumors, which often tend to grow during pregnancy, delivered her boy six weeks early.

Doctors told Ulrich the baby would be her first and last. They decided her fibroid tumors needed to be surgically removed and suggested a hysterectomy, but Ulrich search for an alternative instead.

The new mother found the "Mona Lisa," a seven-foot surgical robot that helps doctors perform fibroid removal surgery without damaging the uterus.

Dr. Arnold Advincula, the gynecological surgeon who performed Ulrich's surgery, says the robot's hands allow him to perform surgery in a way his own do not. The robot arms rotate a full 360 degrees.

‘Mona Lisa — Women Adore You’

During surgery with Mona Lisa, Advincula looks through a lens on a console which allows him to see three-dimensional imaging inside the patient's body. Two hand grips and foot pedals allow him to manipulate the robot within the patient. Every one of the doctor's hand movements is translated by the robotic arms.

"Its middle arm is the camera arm," Advincula explained. "Its right and left arms hold the instruments which serve as an extension of my arm, when I sit at the console and do the surgery."

Advincula said the robot named Mona Lisa will allow many women with fibroid tumors to keep their uterus. They affect roughly one out of four Caucasian and one in two African-American women. Of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed in the country each year, 30 percent are due to uterine fibroids.

"What excites me about being able to perform this surgery for patients is that it's giving me a chance to provide more options for them, and not leave them limited with, you know, one or two choices of which one of them is hysterectomy," he said. "I think a lot of women feel that they have to give up their fertility if they have uterine fibroids and that's not necessarily the case."

Forty-two-year-old Laura Lyjak, a mother of two, suffered from painful periods and excessive bleeding due to her fibroids. She decided to undergo the robotic procedure to remove them, instead of removing her uterus.

"When I was given the choices I was really happy to not hear the H-word come up," Lyjak said. "A hysterectomy is really a worst-case scenario even at my time in life when I am not planning on having more children."

Like Star Trek

Lyjak said the idea of having a robot involved, especially one named Mona Lisa, was a little strange, but also exciting. "It feels futuristic in a really great sort of way. You know, I kept thinking about Star Trek when the doctor would just kind of wave his hand over your body and everything would be fine," Lyjak said. "I'd love it for that to happen. And this sounds like the closest thing to that," she said.

The University of Michigan is the first and only hospital applying robotic technology in this type of surgery.

"When I was in medical school, I did not envision operating with the aid of a robot," Advincula said. "So to come this far in that short amount of time makes me extremely excited about what the next 10 years holds for medicine," he said.

ABCNEWS' Dr. Nancy Snyderman said the robotic procedure has been used on 20 women, but is still in the investigative stage.

"Robots are changing everything in medicine and I wouldn't be surprised to see more applications in a lot of different fields," she said.

Fibroid tumors are usually benign and vary in size and location on a woman's reproductive organs. If fibroid tumors are severe enough to cause certain symptoms, including excess bleeding during menstruation and severe pain, surgery is often the required treatment.