You are all welcome to attend the final lecture in the How Do You Look? series. 


Professor Sir Ara Darzi, Imperial College London will speak on

Cybersurgery: robots in the operating theatre

Thursday 14 December 2006, 7pm
Lecture Theatre 2, The Royal College of Surgeons of England

Tickets cost £8/5 concessions and include a glass of wine and a visit to the Hunterian Museum, to book call 020 7869 6560 or email [log in to unmask]

At no other time in history has such a rapid transition to the future occurred. What had been a century of evolution from the Industrial Age to the Information Age has, over the past decade, become a revolution. Laparoscopic or minimal access surgery, which provided the "wake-up call to the information age" as the leading edge technology, has become the accepted standard of medical practice; now even more advanced technologies promise further improvements in the practice of medicine.

It is interesting, but obvious, that the changes that led to the birth of surgery were contingent on the discoveries that ushered in the Industrial Age. This is being replaced by the Information Age, and conventional surgery is being replaced by a host of minimally invasive therapies and noninvasive procedures. Because we are currently in the middle of this transition, it is unclear now how the next generation of medicine and surgery will appear. Trends in the technologies are toward low-power, miniaturized, low-cost yet highly "intelligent" systems that eventually will transform surgery from minimally invasive into noninvasive procedures whose development will depend on the emerging Information Age technologies. Laparoscopic surgery is not an end-point; rather, it is a transitional phase between the radical approach of "open" surgery and the emerging forms of noninvasive image-guided procedures (Interventional MR).

Now is the time that all of these separate elements that the unit is currently active involved in such as laparoscopic surgery, telepresence, virtual reality, digital imaging, and networking are coming together. This lecture will attempt to highlight some of these advances and potentials for the future.

For more information on the How Do You Look? exhibition see www.howdoyoulook.co.uk . The exhibition closes at 5pm on 21st December 2006.


Jane Hughes
Audience Development Officer
Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons
____________________________________
35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, WC2A 3PE
t:020 7869 6561; f:020 7869 6564; [log in to unmask]
To find out more about the Hunterian Museum click here: http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums




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