Dr. Vaughan of New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center explains the nature of robotic surgery, how it lessens pain, and prospects for improvement in the future.

I could be sitting right here, and be operating in another room, another county, another city. Most of the discomfort from surgery is from how you, If I can put it that way, open the box, how to get to what you need to do, what sort of incision - the pain is mainly from the incision, not from what you do once you get there. So if we can work through mini incisions, laparoscopic approaches then the discomfort of patient is marginally reduced. Take that one step further, and just think of a straight instrument through your abdomen, and it can't do what your hand can do. But if you can put something in with a little hand on the end of it, and put your hands in gloves, and whatever you do, those little hands do, that's robotic surgery. How do we make robotics better? We're beginning to try and work with nanotechnology to have the little robot hands that actually can feel, since we can't feel when we do robotic.