Doctor tweets surgery

Micheal Crump, Staff Writer
Published On: 10/26/2009

UAB Medicine provided health care professionals, medical students, and the public with a glimpse of what future surgeries might be like.

On Friday, October 23 at 8 AM central standard time, Dr. Martin Heslin, MD, twittered step-by-step tweets of a robotic removal of an adrenal gland on a middle-aged man who had severe high blood pressure.

His hypertension was aggravated by a small hormone-producing tumor making the man a great candidate for this particular surgery.

The patient was referred to a UAB hypertension specialist clinic and underwent a computed tomography or a CT scan of the abdomen.

The results of the scan led to the diagnosis of hypertension that cannot be treated using current drug treatments, called primary aldosteronism, and it is being increasingly recognized in the medical community.

The treatment that the physician decided on was using a robotic-controlled procedure called an adrenalectomy. The typical patient usually has both adrenal glands present and has not had extensive prior surgery in the surrounding areas.

Using robotic surgery, which has been the preferred method of surgery of this type for the last decade and is minimally invasive, the surgery was to take about four hours and several days of recuperating time.

Tweeting the surgery happened almost as the doctor entered the room and was undocking the robot and being prepped for the first stage of the surgery.

Within the first hours of surgery, there tweets about the adrenal gland being removed along with its veins, seeing the actual tumor for the first time, and describing to the general public where the adrenal glad is in relation to the human body and what its role was.

As Helsin has performed more than 40 robotic surgeries, he was accustomed to the use of the robotic arm as the tumor itself was only 1.5 cm in length.

The robotic instrument has a 180 degree mobility and a 3D binocular visual output than can be increased to a magnification of 10 times. Tweets halfway through the surgery ranged from docking the robot to analyzing drug usage to control the patients blood pressures, and making four incisions to insert ports into the tumor.

The patient was fully aware of the surgery being tweeted in real-time and all the members of the OR, or operating room, were making sure that the tweets did not affect the patient, doctor, or the surgery itself.

The tweets were sent via a device specifically designed for this and sent to a computer that relayed all tweets to the online world. Heslin was also able to ask questions via tweets from students and the general public as the surgery progressed.

In the end, the adrenal tumor was removed safely and the patient is currently recovering. This procedure is a very excellent prognosis of a cure as not only the tumor is removed but the adrenal glad as well.

The other adrenal gland takes the role of both adrenal glands and using the robot is necessary for operating on tumors 8cm or less in size.

Using robotic-assisted surgery is nothing new for UAB surgeons, but Twitter is and is now becoming a tool to teach prospective medical students what exactly happens on the operating table as well as asking the physician in real-time what he is doing with a particular organ or tool.

Email: gnostic1@uab.edu