"Autonomous" Heart Surgery Robot Mystery Solved

Last week, I asked WiSci readers if they'd heard anything more about the autonomous heart surgery robot that purportedly performed a heart surgery back in May 2006. Well, a kind and knowledgeable reader wrote in with the answer. Turns out that the "autonomous" robot was no such thing (emphasis added):

I believe that you will find that the article that described what Pappone had done at the Heart Rhythm Society meeting last year was in error. I chased this down at the time because of the fantastic nature of the claims and found that Carlo was using a Stereotaxis magnetically guided catheter system to do cardiac ablation. He had used it in a tele-operated procedure at the conference where he controlled the system from the meeting while the actual device was back in Italy. There was no autonomy.

The provider of this information chose to remain anonymous, but was an early employee at Hansen Medical Devices (HNSN), which makes the Sensei robotic surgery system for navigating catheters up through the body. They had an IPO back in 2006, and despite a rough day on the market yesterday, are up almost 200% since they landed on NASDAQ.