

Robotic surgery linked to 144 deaths in the US - mcspecter
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33609495

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stephengillie
Previous submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9920913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9920913)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9923294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9923294)

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My response from a previous submission:

> _Their paper says 144 deaths, 1,391 injuries and 8,061 device malfunctions
> were recorded out of a total of more than 1.7 million robotic procedures
> carried out between January 2000 and December 2013._

So that's 0.00847% death rate, 0.082% injury rate, and 0.47% device
malfunction rate.

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DiabloD3
Thank you for your statistical analysis.

Is there matching statistics comparing the death and injury percentage of non-
robotic surgeries?

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stephengillie
Sadly there's not; this is one of the complaints about the article that has
come up in previous discussions.

Another commenter did come up with equivalent statistics that showed humans
with a much higher error rate; however others disputed the comparison as the
time frame and other factors did not match exactly.

