A woman allegedly died after a surgical robot “burned a hole in her intestine,” causing a fatal internal leak, a lawsuit claims.
Sandra Sultzer, 78, from Boca Raton, California, died in 2022 following surgery to treat her colon cancer using a da Vinci robot a year earlier.
The four-armed device is activated by a doctor using a camera, while the surgeon uses a joystick and pedals to control the robot’s arms from a console.
But the lawsuit, which was filed by the victim’s husband, claims an electrical fault occurred when the robotic arms were cutting into the patient’s body tissue.
According to the plaintiff, stray electrical energy from the machine’s arms burned Sandra Sultzer’s internal organs without the knowledge of the surgical team.
The lawsuit claims that Mme Sultzer suffered burns to her small intestine as a result of this failure.
The burn caused by the electric arc went unnoticed because it was outside the doctor’s vision area.
“If ISI had designed its product so that stray electrical energy would not burn patients’ insides without surgeons’ knowledge or control, M’s small intestine injuryme Sultzer would not have occurred and she would not have died,” the lawsuit states.
This is not the first time da Vinci robots have caused undue harm to patients.
The lawsuit also states that Intuitive Surgical Inc., the company that created the gadget, received “thousands of reports of injuries and defects.”
