The Hands of the Surgeon

Despite the current advances in computer simulation and simulated surgery, which are bound to develop even further as computers and imaging technologies themselves develop, the final step in the whole process is the surgical procedure itself. Even in the fast-advancing field of robotic telesurgery, this is still very firmly in the hands of the plastic surgeon, or surgeon from any other involved speciality. Whether or not the reconstruction will simulate the desired result remains well-based on the skill of the surgeon in assimilating the computer data and empirically simulating the missing hard and soft tissue, just as Sushruta was doing without any computer assistance some 2,500 years ago. Computer technology will not help to make a bad plastic surgeon into a good one, but it has the real ability to make the simulative skills of a good plastic surgeon even better.