A robotic device burned and tore a woman’s small intestine while she was undergoing surgery for colon cancer, according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed this week in Florida. The woman, Sandra Sultzer, developed abdominal pain and fever after her surgery in September 2021 and needed additional procedures to close the tear, the lawsuit said. The suit said she died in February 2022 because of the small intestine injury.
The technology is meant to make procedures more precise and less invasive, which in theory would lead to shorter and less painful recoveries. Intuitive introduced the first version of the da Vinci system in 1999, when robotic surgery was still relatively novel. The FDA approved the system a year later. According to Sultzer’s lawsuit, Intuitive received hundreds of complaints and reports about its da Vinci robot from July 2009 to December 2011.