The role of robotics in interventional radiology: current status

The evolution of medicine has moved from open procedures and non-targeted medications to minimally invasive therapies to treat complex problems with even more accuracy. Therefore clinicians choosing a career in interventional radiology are engraining themselves in the exciting future developments presented to the speciality. On the diagnostic radiology front multimodality fusion and functional imaging promises to further improve the capability of the radiologist to diagnose problems down to a molecular level and this dominates the health news pages related to the field. In interventional radiology the next big step to try and improve accuracy of targeted procedures is the introduction of robotics. One of the key note talks at the British Society of Interventional Radiology annual meeting 2014 was specifically related to this topic (1). In addition this was a topic discussed at TEDMED UK 2013 and highlighted that radiology can overcome some of the problems that have been encountered by surgical robots (2).