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Later, Patronik reviews the video. He sees the pig's chest open, the throbbing heart revealed. Ota's gloved hand then gently lifts and turns the organ. There, on the exposed epicardium, is a circular tattoo of dye marks—HeartLander's version of the American flag thrust into the lunar soil.

While HeartLander's sci-fi appeal has helped attract media attention from the likes of The New York Times, Business Week, and BBC News, it's the robot's practical applications that have surgeons buzzing:

• A recent test demonstrated that HeartLander is capable of placing pacemaker electrodes anywhere on the epicardium—a far greater range than existing techniques allow.



• Riviere notes that the robot could be outfitted with a probe to allow surgeons to treat arrhythmia by ablating(medical-speak for "zapping") damaged or malfunctioning cardiac tissue. Nearly 550,000 ablation and electrode placement procedures are done each year.



• Multiple tests, including HeartLander's journey to the dark side of the heart, have shown HeartLander to beeffective in delivering myocardial injections using its on-board needle. Riviere predicts it could deliver therapy like stem cell treatments to regenerate damaged heart muscle.



• Because the minimally-invasive HeartLander surgeries don't require lung deflation, they could be performedunder local, rather than general, anesthesia. The phrase Zenati utters to explain what that means seems incongruous yet conceivable: "Outpatient heart surgery."

The robot would be significantly cheaper than other current devices for these kinds of procedures, Riviere points out, possibly becoming disposable, like a syringe. Patronik adds that HeartLander could be used in situations when a surgeon must treat a patient remotely—even to the extreme of a patient not being on Earth—which is why NASA awarded Patronik (CS'08) a fellowship to support HeartLander work.

Robert Poston, chief of cardiac surgery and co-director of the Cardiovascular Center at Boston Medical Center, is by no means a skeptic of HeartLander's possibilities. He observed it in action during a recent physicians' seminar organized by HeartLander Surgical, Inc., a Carnegie Mellon spinoff company that is commercializing the robot.

"I was impressed by how far along they are with their technology," he says. "Right now, there's nothing like this device. It's totally novel. I think it has the potential to make a big impact on cardiology."

The inventors of HeartLander say there is more testing to be done; Riviere estimates in another three to eight years the robot will be used in humans.

Bo Schwerin is a science writer for NASA and an award-winning freelance writer. He is a regular contributor to this magazine.

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