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By piece over the last 16 years. and you can thank what s called the canada arm 2 for that. it built the iss while in orbit and grabs incoming spacecraft docking them to the station. there are no do-overs in space, meaning the canada arm 2 can t miss. so it s robotics are some of the most precise and accurate technologies you can find. that same technology used on the space station was applied to a surgical robot here on earth, a robot that wants to remove the word inoperable from our vocabulary. outside an operating room at foothills hospital in calgary, canada, dr. garnett sutherland preps his patient. we ve gone through everything and you re going to have the operation on the right side. reporter: lee is 22 years old and has an aneurysm. today he is undergoing brain surgery to remove it. but it s what s happening alongside the surgeons that ....
Night otherwise. at the robot s workstation dr. sutherland removes the aneurysm from lee s brain. believe it or not, it s over. reporter: when the aerospace engineers first built canada arm 2 for the space station, they never dreamed it would help people rebuild their lives. those unintended benefits continue to extend to our daily lives here on earth. just break off a piece. reporter: including what you eat, and how you exercise. we use all the different surfaces of the space station, so they re in different configurations. making a fist something we do to show resolve. to defend ourselves. to declare victory. so cvs health provides expert support and vital medicines. at our infusion centers or in patients homes. ....
reporter: it took six years for the neuroarm to come to life. this is the second generation robot that dr. sutherland hopes will soon be in hospitals around north america and the world. so this is a descendant of the original robot and it has two arms. and the two arms are like surgeons. they multi-articulate and they are quite precise at the tool tip. and this robot can perform microsurgery. reporter: the neuroarm is built to increase safety and accuracy. no matter how good a surgeon is, the human hand has a natural tremor. the robot filters out the tremor for a perfectly steady tool. the precision needed for space was a good match for surgery. in the brain, every tiny millimeter counts. by reducing the risk, dr. sutherland and neuroarm can operate on patients he might ....
I remember saying in the letter, you know, you people make robots for very unusual environments. reporter: mcdonald detweiler and associates knows all about building robots for extreme environments. they have worked with nasa and the canadian space agency since the 1970s, and they built the canada arm 2, the robotic arm on the international space station. the aerospace engineers decided to adapt that same technology for dr. sutherland s surgical robot. but building a robot that could function inside an mri machine in the operating room was a new challenge, even for the space engineers. one of the absolute requirements was that wherever we control this robot, which we thought about outside the operating room, controlling the robot inside the operating room, that place has to recreate the sight, the sound and the touch of surgery. we want this robot to feel. ....
Makes this so unique. as lee is being prepped, so is this machine. it s called the neuroarm. it s a brain surgery robot, inspired by the international space station. dr. sutherland and his team had the idea to bring an mri machine into the operating room on a track. it cut down on the time required to move a patient to the room with the mri in it. but the problem was even bringing the machine into the operating room still stopped down the surgery. to me that was a challenge, because that disrupts the rhythm of surgeons. surgeons get into a rhythm as they move through a procedure. so then from that, the idea was that we should build a rebougob that could access that space. so one evening we wrote a letter to mcdonald detwaller. ....