I want to start with a very important disclaimer:
My visit to go and see a HUGO case has nothing to do with Medtronic. At the AI2M - artificial intelligence meeting - I was on a panel with Prof. Matteo Rottoli - who is currently publishing a lot of good work on robotics in colorectal surgery. We got talking at the coffee break and I talked about my concerns of HUGO (well documented.) He is a big user of HUGO RAS in colorectal work.
He very kindly invited me to come and see the system in live cases at Polyclinico di Sant’Orsola in Bologna; to let me see it up close as it performs now.
The background was “It’s not as bad as you think…” And as many of you know - I’ve not been overly impressed with the HUGO RAS, so let me give some background to set my starting point for the day. And then I’ll get into a super deep dive on what I saw… and what I think.
My starting point with HUGO RAS
I come from the world of promoting modular robot arms, open consoles and differentiated systems to the Intuitive da Vinci. I am a firm believer that for many hard core laparoscopic surgeons the da Vinci style boom architecture is too restrictive vs their current laparoscopic paradigms that they find it hard (in some cases) to migrate across and integrate a “robot” into their blended practice of surgery.