Valley doctors using robots as hands during surgery

It's harder than it looks and some folks got to experience operating this robot, pretending to be a doctor for the day at Banner Del E. Webb Medical Center.

The Di Vinci Robots are used by doctors daily to perform all types of abdominal surgeries. Doctors' hands operate the robotic hands, which are similar to tweezers.

"If you use it enough you find that you actually have a lot more dexterity using the robotic fingers than you do with your own fingers," Dr. Sivarajan said.

Doctors have been using these robots since the early 2000s and now train on them in medical school.

"You adjust the chair and the monitor to your own height, so you're not hunched over and you don't get sore and tired after the surgeries," Dr. Lee said.

The robots don't just benefit the doctors.

"It's just the patient really benefits from having it done robotically, it's a patient that has little, tiny incisions instead of a big incision and they go home the next day instead of several days in the hospital," Dr. Sivarajan said.

Dr. Lee says the recovery time is much less and scars are much smaller.

"There's never a malfunction, I think the biggest concern people have is they hear robot and they think we are in another room operating and the robot is operating, but we're actually in the same room and we see the patient the whole time," he said.

Ryan is 11-years-old and he's pretty good at this.

"It was flexible," he said. "I just had a feel for the robot. It was nice."

I gave it a try and didn't quite have that feeling Ryan was talking about.

Doctors also say though it can cut surgery time in half, the price for the patient remains the same whether the robot is used or not.