Robot Performs Revolutionary Eye Surgery to Give Priest Back His Sight

A robot has successfully performed eye surgery for the first time in history.

Father William Beaver, 70, of St. Mary the Virgin Church in Oxford has been struggling with eyesight issues for some time now, stating that he’s had distorted vision.

According to The Daily Mail, the world’s first robotic surgery took place at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital with the help of human surgeons.

“I was completely relaxed and completely comfortable,” said Father Beaver, “because I could see that all the technology was in place and all the goodwill was in place and all the skills were in place.”

Father Beaver needed the procedure because of a membrane that’d been growing on his retina, which had contracted and formed an uneven shape. It was so small that it would’ve been almost impossible for a human hand to handle it without causing any further damage.

Father Beaver created the accuracy of the robot for the successful surgery.

“The key is the precision,” added Father Beaver. “The pulse coursing through the hand of the surgeon could have ruined it, could have given me a hemorrhage and this just made it, well, simple.”

In order for any robotics system to perform surgery of any kind, it needs an incredible amount of precision. Many robots use load cells and torque censors to coordinate these extremely precise movements in real time. Load cells are used as a weighing system that can offer non-intrusive and highly accurate measurements. They can regularly achieve accuracies of 0.003% to one percent depending on the load cell type.

People around the world are reveling at the revolutionary surgery and a common sentiment is that the future of eye surgery is already here.

“Current technology with laser scanners and microscopes allows us to monitor retinal diseases at the microscopic level, but the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can operate on,” said Professor Robert MacLaren.