Aiming to make surgical invasion even more minimal, robots are being devised that can slide into small openings and perform currently messy operations. From Sarah Laskow at the Atlantic:

“In the past few years, surgeons have been pushing to make these less invasive surgeries almost entirely invisible. Instead of cutting a tiny window in the outside of the body, they thought, why not cut one inside? Surgeons would first enter a person’s body through a ‘natural orifice’ and make one small incision, through which to access internal organs. The end result of this idea was that, in 2009, a surgeon removed a woman’s kidney through her vagina.

Few surgeons were convinced this was actually an improvement though. Instead, they have focused on minimizing the number of tiny incisions needed to perform surgery. Single-site surgery requires just one ‘port’ into a body.

A team of surgeons at Columbia, for instance, is working on a small robotic arm—minuscule, when compared to the da Vinci system—that can sneak into one 15 millimeter incision. And NASA is working on a robot that can enter the abdominal cavity through a person’s belly button, Matrix-like, to perform simple surgeries. It’s meant to be used in emergencies, but we know how this story goes: Soon enough, it’ll be routine for a robot to slide into a person’s body and pull her appendix back out.”