Egad! Ran across this article, from DrugWatch.com:

da Vinci Robotic Surgery Complications

Intuitive Surgical Inc. originally developed the da Vinci Surgical System for complex surgeries, but more health care providers are relying on the devices for routine procedures. Patients blame the surgical robots for injuries ranging from electrical burns to organ damage to death.

Before the creation of robotic surgery systems, an electric arc burning the insides of patients wasn’t something that generally happened. Surgeons didn’t have to worry about charred surgical instruments, and their hands and instruments didn’t freeze or move erratically because of computer system errors during surgery.

But all of these have been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as adverse events — or instances where something went wrong — associated with the use of the da Vinci Surgical System and other robotic surgical systems.

Reports of complications with da Vinci Surgery are extremely rare, but those that do happen can be quite severe. Manufacturer Intuitive Surgical Inc. warns on its website of potential risks and complications with its devices. These include the loss of a large amount of blood, as well as possible inadvertent cuts, tears, punctures, burns or other injuries to organs, tissues, major blood vessels or nerves.

Intuitive also says complications could involve the loss of a piece of the instrument, such as a needle or other object used during surgery, inside the patient’s body. Also, the patient could be injured because of the position of his or her body during surgery.

The FDA has an online database of all reports of problems that have occurred with regulated medical devices. The Manufacturer and User Device Experience, or MAUDE, includes thousands of incidents related to the use of various da Vinci robotic systems, ranging from error code bugs to patient deaths. The reports are filed by manufacturers, health care facilities, patients and lawyers.

In a study titled “Adverse Events in Robotic Surgery: A Retrospective Study of 14 Years of FDA Data” researcher Homa Alemzadeh and colleagues looked at 14 years of reports to the FDA at a time when 1.75 million robotic procedures were performed.

Between 2000 and 2013, a total of 144 deaths, 1,391 patient injuries and 8,061 device malfunctions were reported with robotic surgery, according to the study published in PLOS One in 2016.

Burnt or broken pieces of instruments fell into the patient in 14.7 percent of the reported cases. Another 10.5 percent of reports involved electrical arcing of instruments, and 8.6 percent involved unintended operation of instruments. System errors and video/imaging problems were reported in 5 percent and 2.6 percent of the cases, respectively.

More complex surgeries such as heart, head and neck procedures had higher numbers of injuries and deaths than surgeries for which robots are used more often, such as gynecological and urological procedures. Surgeons had to wait for the system to restart, or they had to switch to non-robotic techniques or reschedule procedures more than 10 percent of the time.

Well, as long as your self-driving autonomous ambulance gets you home in one piece . . .