(upbeat music) [Mike] This is kinda what you'd expect from a mechanical engineer who grew up in the back of his parents' small town hardware store.

You have a toolbox in your office.

[Farritor] I do.

Why?

Well, I keep tools in it, obviously.

I try to not be too far away from a pair of pliers or a screwdriver.

I'm kind of a vise grips fan.

I like to build things.

I build a lot of things.

I build stuff at work.

When I go home at night and on the weekends, I build stuff there.

So I've kind of always been that kind of guy.

[Mike] Here's the big thing he's building now with his company, Virtual Incision.

A robot surgery platform called MIRA.

Here's how it works.

This part is inserted in the patient, two arms and a camera.

It's like we've shrunk the surgeon down and put them inside the body.

MIRA has different instruments, graspers, and scissors.

It has cautery energy, so they can burn and cut at the same time and prevent bleeding.

And it really goes in there and dissects tissue and performs the tasks that are required to do surgery.

The surgeon operates the robot with foot pedals and hand controllers, here in a mock surgical suite in the Virtual Incision office.

Tell me how this works.

Yeah, sure.

So first of all, get comfortable in the chair.

You should always be comfortable when you're using MIRA.

So we have these arm supports for your elbows, and then I always tell people it's like a cowboy, he's got his two six guns, you sit here and you have a trigger finger and you hold these sort of pistol grips.

You ready to try it out?

Yeah.

My turn.

Trying basic tasks Farritor says surgeons use to learn how to use these tools.

One foot petal is a clutch, releasing the hand controllers.

Another moves the camera.

My hands control a grabber and a cutter.

The 2D-3D transformation looks hard for civilians like you and me.

Why is that?

[Farritor] We're used to having that stereoscopic depth perception.

Surgeons are very good at it.

Very adept.

This is something they do a lot of.

Yeah, good start, but unless your insides are foam tubes and pegs, you probably don't want to see me in the operating room.

All right, that was fun.

The concept is similar to robotic surgery tools commonly in use for a couple decades.

The big difference, small size.

First of all, it's very easy to move our device from room to room.

That's kind of unheard of in the world of robotic surgery, the fact that you can roll it into a room and set it up in just a few minutes with just one person.

The small has economic impacts.

Small can be cheaper, less expensive, and that has advantages in our healthcare system obviously as well.

So really what we're focused on is just more access, more rooms, and more availability.

When you go from these awesome robots that are big, we're now talking about awesome robots that are small.

[Mike] Jobst is a colon and rectal surgeon.

He's performed robotic assisted surgery for more than a decade, and is helping test MIRA.

We, for instance, in our trial have been able to perform multiple operations with the same device, the same hardware, but we've moved it to five different operating rooms.

You certainly couldn't do that with other devices that are on the market right now.

[Mike] The guy with the big toolbox helps lead this.

But since 2006, Virtual Incision has grown to a 40-person company with millions of dollars of funding.

Farritor and UNMC collaborator and surgeon Dmitry Oleynikov started years ago with the idea of creating a robot to put entirely inside the patient's body.

They've moved on to the current concept, which has evolved through more than 50 versions.

Oh yeah, well, I always joked that it'll say in my gravestone, "The robot better work," or something like that.

Talk about the challenges of building something like this.

Yeah, well honestly, everything's hard.

It's a highly regulated product, and there's a lot of testing that has to occur and a lot of documentation to go along with it.

And then just technically, it's difficult.

It's a small device that's trying to do big things.

[Mike] MIRA is in the final stages of clinical trials for normal surgical use, but it could end up in some unusual places.

Farritor and team are working with the US military to see if something like this could treat wounded soldiers closer to front lines.

And working with NASA, they'll send it to the International Space Station for tests in 2024.

Nice for Farritor, who worked on his PhD at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

Are you having fun with this?

Yeah, I've always enjoyed making robots and I've always enjoyed building things.

I get to do both here.

Best part of what this sort of triggers for you personally?

Oh, without a doubt, the best part is the idea that we could make an impact, that we can help people have better surgeries.

And the more of that we do the better.

So I think there's a potential to one day treat many, many patients and help a lot of people.

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