The very first X-ray image is a blurry, ghostlike view of a woman’s left hand, two sizable wedding rings visible on her third finger. Using his wife as his test subject, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen used the power of the X-ray to gaze at bones beneath his wife’s skin, something he couldn’t have done before without an incision. Six years later, Röntgen won the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physics. The practice of medicine had changed forever.

All that holds true for the use of robotics in partial knee replacement surgery, also called unicompartmental knee arthroplasty or UKA. In fact, a team of Washington University orthopedic researchers found that using robotics during UKA yielded results that were up to 10 times more accurate than doing the procedure without robotic assistance. The study was published in The Bone & Joint Journal, March 2021.

Cancer is most often detected using traditional tissue biopsy: the removal of tissue by needle, endoscope or open surgery. The tissue sample is then examined for the presence of cancer cells. Though the standard of care, this kind of biopsy comes with some limitations. Because the procedure is invasive, it can be risky, and recovery can be uncomfortable. Additionally, such a procedure may not be safe for some people and may not be practical for those needing a series of biopsies to monitor the progress of cancer treatment.

Functional neurosurgery—surgical interaction with the brain to improve function—was pioneered to treat people in need of pain relief, often those suffering with terminal cancer. Simple early procedures included surgically creating tiny lesions, also called ablations, in specific areas of the nervous system linked to pain.

The field has come a long way since those early days, says Jon Willie, MD, PhD, Washington University neurosurgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Three billion is such a large number that it’s hard to fathom. To put it in perspective:

• 3 billion seconds is about 95 years
• If you took 3 billion steps, you could walk around Earth at its equator more than 45 times
• Stacking 3 billion pennies would result in a tower nearly 3,000 miles tall

Three billion also happens to be the number of DNA building blocks, or base pairs, that make up a human genome. And nearly every single cell in our bodies contains two copies of those 3 billion base pairs.