Visual Thinking—The Origin of Robotically Assisted Surgery Innovations

This chapter expands its content from the two following aspects: one is an essay aimed to draw a stretch to present readers Prof. Zhou’s novel perspective of “Visual Surgery” based on his thoughtful heuristics, brilliant insights, and multidisciplinary dimension in robotic surgery and the other aspect is mainly focused on his practical experience in the management of five complicated cases. As for the proposition of “Visual Surgery”, Prof. Zhou has gone much further back and knocked on the door of Gestalt theory, which to a large extent directs our visual thinking or visual perception throughout. In view of the technical features and drawbacks of robotic or image-guided surgery, Prof. Zhou has constructively suggested that surgeons could fundamentally integrate their visual perception into the visualized surgical performance to compensate for the lack of haptic feedback. To traditional open surgery, robotic surgery can be seen as a kind of innovation instrumentally and technically. In the second part of this chapter, five case reports have been displayed to show readers Prof. Zhou’s practical exploration and reflection in the treatment of complex diseases. Witnessing an era of information and technology, surgeons have been encouraged to motivate their creative thinking to expand the nature and future of surgery, just like Prof. Zhou hoped.