Every time I visit a doctor -- especially a surgeon -- I'm struck by how differently we view the same problem. Certainly I'm not very knowledgeable about surgery, but anything that can be solved thereby is essentially a simple engineering problem: move a few grams of matter from point A to point B, with as little mess as possible. The trick is in identifying the right few grams and affecting them with as little impact on their surroundings as possible. That's surgery!
If we had matter transporters a la Star Trek, it seems that the vast majority of surgeries would be trivial. Isolate the matter you want to move, and "transport" it to where you want it to be. Voila!
So as an engineering problem, we could improve most surgeries by creating a new way to isolate and manipulate specific bits of matter. Lasers seem useful when you just need to eliminate some matter, and arthroscopic surgery is really popular because it reduces the impact of an operation on the surrounding tissue. Hm.
I hope people with knowledge of medicine and engineering are studying this problem in depth.
The engineering approach works best in a static system. Living tissue is a dynamic system. It reacts to everything you do.
Yeah, that makes the problem trickier, like working on a powered-on, operational computer system perhaps. But we do that all the time! Of course, the systems are designed for it.
That's the real problem: our bodies aren't optimized for external repair work. They do a pretty good job of fixing themselves, but they don't allow for much outside help.