Da Vinci Surgical Robots

Intuitive Surgical was founded 24 years ago as a spinoff from SRI in Menlo Park, CA to create innovative, robotic-assisted systems that help empower doctors and hospitals to make surgery less invasive than an open approach. With more than 43,000 da Vinci trained surgeons using 5000 systems in 66 countries, over 5 million patients have been treated using the technology to-date.  Jonathan will discuss Intuitive Surgical’s history and how it creates value for patients, surgeons and healthcare systems worldwide.  He will highlight areas of growth for surgical robotics in general, with a deeper dive into areas that could benefit from improvement.

Jonathan Sorger is the vice president of research at Intuitive Surgical, where he leads a group whose main focus is to address unmet clinical needs through the use of robotic technologies.  He attended Leland High School in San Jose, continued on to study bioengineering at UC San Diego and received the PhD and MBA degrees from Johns Hopkins University with a focus on biomedical engineering and magnetic resonance imaging applied to cardiac pathologies.