Doctors at New York-Presbyterian say you haven't seen anything like this. As NY1's Kafi Drexel reports, for the first time ever, it's not just nurses helping out in the operating room, now they're relying on some hi-tech assistance.

Meet Penelope. She's now giving doctors at New York-Presbyterian an extra hand, at least that's how the doctors might put it.

Penelope is really a robotic arm, quipped with voice recognition technology that understands commands from doctors and nurses in the operating room. A surgeon can ask for any instrument, a scalpel for example, and hand it over.

Not only that, Penelope also has software that can predict what kind of instrument a surgeon might need next. She even talks!

“It's the 21st century, and we should have machines like this helping out in surgery,” says Dr. Michael Treat, the creator of Penelope. “There's plenty of work in surgery. You may not realize how many things we have to keep track of.”

The robot, known as the Penelope Surgical Instrument Server, was designed by Dr. Treat, founder of Robotical Surgical Tech of New York. In a medical first Thursday, the robot assisted in the removal of a benign tumor on the forearm of a patient.

Doctors and nurses say not only does the robot help save time in the OR, but they say Penelope is a valuable tool that comes at a time when surgical teams are facing shortages in manpower.

Penelope does a lot in the operating room, but most likely she won't be putting doctors and nurses out of their jobs any time soon. They say the robots aren't there to replace them, but to simply make their jobs easier.

“We envision that Penelope will relieve us, the surgical team, of some of the repetitive tasks that would otherwise consume a lot of our time and energy,” says Dr. Spence Amory of New York-Presbyterian. “This will free us up to remain focused on patients and the surgical procedure.”

While the robot's only there to assist the doctors, and never has direct contact with patients, doctor's say Penelope and other technology like her is something patients will start seeing a lot more of operating rooms.

They do admit that the robot has made mistakes, but she's always supervised by a human to correct her. Perhaps that's why they believe even though the robot helps, she'll never replace the human touch.

- Kafi Drexel