PARIS: A team of French surgeons has performed the world's first surgery in zero gravity environment in an aircraft hovering thousands of feet above France.
The team, led by Dominique Martin, head of Bordeaux University Hospital's plastic surgery unit, operated on a volunteer patient and removed a fatty cyst from his forearm in an A-300 Airbus Zero-G jet, which climbed and dived sharply several times to replicate brief periods of weightlessness in the cabin.
Martin said the tumor on the patient had been removed "without any particular problem" in less than 10 minutes. He said it was a feasibility test to prove that surgery can be performed in space stations or long distance space flights.
Martin said the operation was performed in 32 sequences, during which the plane flew in arcs, putting it into free fall and creating weightless conditions for 22 seconds each time. In a specially developed operation theater aboard the plane, surgical instruments were held in place by powerful magnets and the surgeons by harnesses.
The facility, developed with the help of a elevator manufacturing company, is intended to be set up in the International Space Station and possibly in the base planned on the moon. There is project, supported by the European Space Agency, to develop robot surgeons, which would perform complex medical operations in space, guided by real surgeons on earth.
While in normal conditions, the operation could be performed in a straightforward manner using local anesthesia. But, in a zero gravity situation, the work is harder and the patient's body reacts differently, Martin said.
He added that cardiac output is reduced, which creates vascular stress. Blood does not pump in the same way and it flows out of a wound in spheres. The surgeon had to create a special vacuum aspirator to contain this.
The five-man medical team and the patient landed safely at an airport in southwestern France after the three-hour flight.
According to Bordeaux hospital sources, the patient, Philippe Sanchot, was chosen as he is a bungee-jumper and accustomed to dramatic gravitational shifts. The surgeons as well as the patient had undergone training in zero gravity machines.
In the next phase of the program, a surgery will be performed in a satellite using a robot controlled from the ground.
