Randall K. Wolf, MD, '79, blends magic and robotics to make surgery easier and less painful for patients.

It was a chilly but sunny December day when 10-year-old Andrea and her brothers Kevin, 7, and Travis, 5, took center stage at an outdoor festival in Columbus, Ohio, for a Wolf family magic show.

Kevin performs one of his favorite illusions, putting red, green and yellow balls in a tube and - voila! - making their order change. As the youngest illusionist in the family, Travis performs feats of magic with his father's assistance. Andrea, who is almost a veteran showman with five years of public performances under her belt, does sleight-of-hand magic and assists her father with more complicated illusions. She even gets "cut in half" during the performance.

The children learned their showmanship from their father Randall K. Wolf, MD '79, who often incorporates his hobby into lectures and training sessions on much more serious topics: endoscopic and robotic thoracic surgery. Last year his research and lectures took him around the globe the equivalent of four times. Dr. Wolf is proud of the fact that he was the first surgeon in North America to use the da Vinci™ Surgical System to do robotic coronary bypass surgery. He has performed more than seventy-five telesurgeries demonstrating cardiac and thoracic procedures in more than fifteen countries.

Finding a less traumatic alternative to conventional thoracic surgery has been a medical mission for Dr. Wolf.

"When I was a fourth-year medical student," he explains, "I had the opportunity to help on my first thoracotomy at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis. I was very impressed with how traumatic the incision was considering we were doing a biopsy. Those patients had a lot of pain after the operation and I thought there must be a better way to do this."

Many miles, much research and several illusions later, Dr. Wolf thinks he is on the front line of discovery for less invasive surgery.

"When I started doing endoscopic surgery no one had heard of using the scope in the chest," says Dr. Wolf, who at the time in 1998 was a cardio-thoracic surgeon at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati.

He has distinguished himself as an innovator in endoscopic and robotic surgery, which earned him his position as associate professor of surgery and director of minimally invasive cardiac surgery and robotics in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health. He was recruited to OSU by then Dean Bernadine Healy, MD, current president of the American Red Cross and former director of the National Institutes for Health.

To secure Dr. Wolf's appointment, OSU purchased two robots so he could continue his surgical procedures and research. Since then, he has completed the first FDA study utilizing robots and a small scalpel-made incision for bypass surgery and is beginning his second FDA study for ten bypass cases to be done solely with the robotic technique.

The da Vinci robotic system gives surgeons the advantage of instrument control. "The surgeon feels like his or her hands are inside the chest," Dr. Wolf says. "It is the best 3-D system in the world."

Just five years ago endoscopic cardiac surgery was a dream, Dr. Wolf notes, but now, "the sky's the limit." This future vision leads him to teach people in seminars at OSU and around the world. Last year he hosted the First North American Conference on Robotics in Cardiac Surgery at OSU; he will host the second conference later this year.

And, as he de-mystifies robotic surgery for other physicians, he often enhances the lesson with his other kind of magic. "When I lecture, I usually do an illusion or two and the audience appreciates it - they're stimulated, awake and alert. Then in the evening, I frequently do a show."

His "trick bag" is packed with illusions. They make his travel more entertaining, in more ways than one. He has been stopped by airport officials in Japan and Germany, as well as the United States, and asked to explain some of his props, including a gun that was used in a card trick. That prop now stays home because of tightened security at airports.

Although Dr. Wolf doesn't have a crystal ball, he is confident that robotic surgery will advance rapidly. "I predict computer-assisted surgery will play a major part in cardiac surgery, general surgery, vascular surgery and urologic surgery in the next four years."

In the meantime, Dr. Wolf will continue to put magic in his medicine with nothing up his sleeve.

Well, maybe an endoscope.