But when it comes to bridging the robotic-surgery divide, D. Champ Weeks, MD, is keen to usher his colleagues across.

“One of our goals is simply to create a center of excellence for minimally invasive surgery,” said Weeks, a urologist who joined Memorial Hospital at Gulfport last spring as medical director of robotic surgery.

He’s since worked with specialists in OB/GYN, cardiothoracic surgery and general surgery to develop a standard protocol for gaining robotic-surgery privileges. A half-dozen of his colleagues have already achieved privileges, and surgeons at Memorial have performed more than 160 robotic-assisted procedures in the first year.

“I want to encourage all of our specialties in the OR to start looking for minimally invasive approaches and to continue to challenge ourselves as surgeons with new techniques,” Weeks said. “It does not matter how long you’ve been practicing medicine, there are constant changes and we want to be consistent with and even exceed the standard of care.”

The focus on robotic surgery is one Weeks brought from Washington, where he practiced with MultiCare Urology of Tacoma for four years including one year as chief of surgery.

The move to Mississippi was prompted by the transfer of his wife, Capt. Leslie Lousteau Weeks, MD, an OB/GYN in the U.S. Army now stationed at Keesler Air Force Base. Though they had enjoyed living in the Pacific Northwest, they welcomed the chance to be closer to family in her hometown of New Orleans — especially after having welcomed daughter Mary Mattison in 2009.

In Gulfport, Weeks has joined three other physicians at Coast Urology Center in a hospital-based practice. In conjunction with his arrival in April 2010, Memorial Hospital invested in the da Vinci® Si High Definition Robotic Assisted Surgical System. Weeks self-trained with the system while in Tacoma.

“At this point, residents are coming out with at least some exposure to robotic surgery, if not complete training in it,” he said. “When I finished six years ago, we did everything laparoscopically, yet the robot was not readily available to most centers. I knew I wanted to add it as a skill set, but it evolved into something everybody wanted. Today it’s one of the major focuses of my entire career.”

For Weeks, the benefits of robot-assisted surgery were summed up by his first patient who, after having his prostate removed, declared: “You’ve turned a major surgery into a minor inconvenience.”

His patients typically go home the next day regardless of the type of robotic surgery performed, rather than spending several days in the hospital. Following surgery, they are able to return to work and all activities of daily living in about two weeks.

While Weeks still practices general urology — from diagnosing kidney stones to answering emergency-room calls — his role as Memorial’s director of robotic surgery has allowed him to engage other specialties in a broader way. The first step to building a program at Memorial was developing a protocol for gaining privileges that could apply across specialties.

“We go through a pretty rigorous requirement of having robotic training by the company that makes the robot, accompanied by proctored cases and supervised cases by experienced surgeons,” Weeks said. “Then we all sit down and agree that this surgeon is capable and safe to proceed and can do what they need to do in the patient’s best interest.”

The entire process may take as little as two or three months, depending on a surgeon’s caseload.

Learning to use the robot for procedures is an intuitive process, Weeks said. As the surgeon moves his or her hand, the robot moves its instrument. The advantage comes in the delicate, finessed movements the robot arm is able to achieve, through incisions smaller than the size of a dime, all guided by the 3D visualization.

“The robotic camera gives you 10-times magnification of the naked eye, so you’re able to see blood vessels and typically preserve everything you need to in order to minimize damage to surrounding tissues,” Weeks said. “They say that ‘perfect is the enemy of good,’ but I don’t buy that when it comes to surgery.”

In his own practice, Weeks uses the da Vinci device for procedures like removing prostates, bladders, kidneys, testicular cancers, lymph nodes and kidney stones as well as kidney reconstruction. He recently performed what he believes was the first robotic bladder removal-and-rebuild in the area.

As more surgeons begin using the system, the hospital has committed an operating room for robotic surgery and has begun designating surgical block time for each specialty.

“We all got busy pretty quick,” Weeks said. “Even people who don’t have an interest in using it or doctors who are not doing surgery want to come by and see it and hear about the benefits for the patient.”

For Weeks, it’s encouraging to be able to offer robot-assisted surgery on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and to begin to see a reversal in the trend of local patients going to New Orleans or Mobile, Ala., for their care.

“Mississippi has taken great strides to bring up the standard of care, and I want to continue to see it grow — particularly on the Gulf Coast,” he said. “There is still a thriving community down here, despite Katrina and the oil spill.”

A native of South Carolina, Weeks completed his surgical internship and urologic residency at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., after having received his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. He also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and a Master of Science in biomechanics from Georgia State University.

He is certified by the American Board of Urology and is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

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