What do you mean by the qualifier 'when working on the brain'? Typically avoiding GA is a laudable goal -- it's expensive (even in countries with public health

What do you mean by the qualifier 'when working on the brain'? Typically avoiding GA is a laudable goal -- it's expensive (even in countries with public health cover), there's a lot more risk, and it would usually involve an overnight stay in a hospital (which might just come under the cost and added risk categories). In the case of this process, it would also involve a human (anaesthesiologist), so on top of risk and cost, you then have resource constraint issues compared to avoiding GA and letting a robot do application of LA and the operation. Open brain surgery often involves keeping the patient conscious as a good way of verifying nothing wrong and/or something right is happening during the operation -- this is probably less of an issue with this kind of repetitive, relatively low-risk, procedure.