At the University of Virginia, increasing the safety of robot-assisted surgery has become a research focus of Homa Alemzadeh, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Last year, 877,000 robot-assisted surgeries were performed across the country. But Alemzadeh and her colleagues also discovered more than 10,000 adverse incidents, with 1,391 cases involving patient injury and 144 resulting in death. Alemzadeh says the role of surgeons and physicians will change significantly as robots become more prominent in medicine and pat...