Intuitive Surgical Earnings Call Nuggets: Cholecystectomies and General Surgery vs. dVH

Aleks Cukic – VP, Strategy: Well, you know, you’re right. I think many of the studies that were cited in the AAGL statement actually compared robotic surgery to laparoscopic surgery, and really failed to recognize that the majority of the robotic cases would have probably previously been done via laparotomy. We had, as you recall, as we’ve gone through our sizing, if you will, of our target market, we’ve talked about this pretty specifically over the years. When we started really with the da Vinci hysterectomy, I think it was estimated that somewhere along the lines of 66% of the hysterectomies performed in the United States were being performed through laparotomy. I believe the solution database, which is a division of Thomson Reuters, I think in a most recent publication, I think goes to 2011, they estimated that only 39% of the procedures in the United States now the hysterectomy procedures are being performed through laparotomy, vaginal I think where something like 14%, laparoscopy was around 16% and the remainder was to da Vinci. So, our objective really is to move these complex procedures from open invasive incisions to minimally invasive surgery and I believe that the record shows that that’s taking place.

General Surgery vs. dVH

Benjamin Andrew – William Blair: Two question for me. First, can you talk about the adoption curve that you’ve see in gen surge so far, and if you adjust for the installed base change, how it compares to maybe dVH most appropriately?

Aleks Cukic – VP, Strategy: Well, it’s interesting in general surgery versus, let’s say dVH, as we are talking about a category. Within the general surgery category, if I’m not mistaken, there have been somewhere around 40 plus procedures that have gone into the category of general surgery that have been done – performed with da Vinci. So, it’s difficult to really compare apples-to-apples between a category and let’s say something like dVH, which is a single procedure. And it’s even more difficult comparing it to, let’s say, dVP, which is a single procedure that is always done for a single disease, which is cancer. In other words, there’s just too many inconsistencies between the three. But what we will say is within the category of general surgery, the two procedures that are driving a great deal of that growth are cholecystectomy and colon surgery, not just low anterior resection, but right colons, left colons, transverse colons, et cetera.