Go Big Red! Go mini-robots!
One of the more intriguing companies seeking money at today’s Invest Midwest venture capital forum is based in Omaha, Neb., which most folks wouldn’t think of as a technology hotbed. But a collaboration between mechanical engineering folks and medical-school folks at the University of Nebraska has led to the creation of Nebraska Surgical Solutions, which makes miniature robotic surgical tools.
As Dmitry Oleynikov, the chief medical officer, explains it, the technology is a disruptive one because it’s better, faster and cheaper than anything else available to surgeons. Better and faster, because it requires no external incision. Cheaper, because the little robots are disposable and cost between $200 and $2,000.
The robots can be used in something called natural orifice surgery. Translation: You swallow the thing, in what looks like a big pill, and the surgeon operates it by remote control. In a second-generation version that’s under development, you’d also swallow a little camera so the surgeon could watch on an LCD screen, much the same way he or she would be able to see an open-incision operation.
Oleynikov says the company will first seek approval for a standard procedure like gallbladder surgery, but eventually he says the robots can be used for any procedure that’s now done laparoscopically.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Sounds to me a lot like a Sci-Fi movie called (I think) Fantastic Voyage that came out in 1966. In that, a group of medical folks were shrunk to microscopic size and travelled in a microscopic mini-sub through somebody’s circulatory system to repair some sort of lesion.
By the way, if the P-D is sincerely interested in receiving comments on these blogs, perhaps they should explain to people that they have X minutes to complete their comments, or the system will keep telling them that their security code entry is invalid and rejecting their comments. Perhaps this sort of obsession with “security” explains why there are so few comments any more. Of course, that’s just an observation from somebody who is not a techno-geek “genius.”