In strip mall, new kind of nurse gets ready for a test

By that logic, Michael R. Treat must be on to something. Just beyond the elevated tracks of the 1 and 9 subway that cuts through the Riverdale section of the Bronx, next door to Williams Funeral Home and an Off-Track Betting parlour, in a ramshackle single-storey strip mall, Treat is hard at work on an invention he hopes will change the way surgeons work in the operating room.

‘‘Meet Penelope,’’ Treat said, motioning toward a robotic arm poised over a set of surgical tools. ‘‘She is one hot little number.’’

And Penelope is looking for a job.

She is meant to replace the scrub nurse, the person in the operating room who hands the surgeon the tools of surgery. Responding to the ever-widening shortage of nurses in the country, and looking to deal with a problem that frustrated him as a working surgeon, Treat and his team of tech whizzes are working feverishly to get Penelope ready for her public debut. New York-Presbyterian Hospital has agreed to test Penelope in March in the operating room on a simple removal of a benign cyst. If all goes well, Treat dreams of putting a Penelope in every hospital across the country.

‘‘The robot should be able to do everything a nurse can,’’ Treat said. And because she is a computer, he said, she can even do some things better. ‘‘Leaving instruments inside patients still happens,’’ he said. The hope is that Penelope, able to keep track of tools as they come and go, will put an end to that.

Treat has the nervous energy of a schoolboy with a crush when he talks about Penelope. He looks a bit like Ralph Nader with glasses — tall, thin and somewhat in need of sunlight. In other words, he does not look like a would-be Hell’s Angel. But outside the Bronx lab, a former clinic lent to the team by New York-Presbyterian, sits his Suzuki Savage motorcycle, waiting until the good doctor feels the need for speed. ‘‘I may look like Robert Ford, but I feel like Jesse James,’’ Treat said, quoting a Bob Dylan lyric. ‘‘It’s a very hot little bike,’’ he added.

When considering a name for the invention, Treat said, he looked for the hot wife of a Greek hero, settling eventually on Penelope, the wife of Ulysses.

‘‘She was faithful, resourceful and clever,’’ Treat said, going on rapidly about her other attributes, describing her testing of suitors and her legendary beauty, until the conversation was directed elsewhere. Of course, New York-Presbyterian would not be taking a chance on the project just because Treat is enthusiastic. The science behind Penelope is where the real innovation lies. And for that, Treat, 55, has the assistance of a team schooled in engineering, maths and computer programming. (Besides being trained as a general surgeon, Treat has a master’s degree in physics.)

For three years, the group has been working together, funded substantially by $6,00,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation. They expect that the robots will eventually cost $1,50,000.

Some of Penelope’s technology is off the shelf, like the voice recognition software. Treat said that this way, as others develop better software, they can update Penelope with relative ease. The major innovation is in Penelope’s visual recognition, the ability to distinguish between surgical tools. Currently, Penelope can recognise 12 tools . —NYT