They say a picture is worth a thousand words; this one could have been worth nearly $800,000.

This “picture” is a chart of Intuitive Surgical’s stock price from February 28, 2003 to May 1, 2012. Over this 9.17-year period, ISRG’s share price rose from $7.52 to $588.28, a gain of more than 7,700%. If you had invested just $10,000 in ISRG at the beginning of this period, you would have been sitting on more than $780,000 at the end. For comparison, a $10,000 investment in the S&P 500 over the same time frame would have netted only $16,700.

While the kinds of returns that ISRG provided in such relatively short order are extremely rare, the space in which the company operates still has the potential to offer savvy investors life-changing gains in the years ahead.

Here’s the story.

Human beings have been performing surgery on each other for thousands of years. Archaeologists have dug up countless trephinated human skulls—which have had a hole cut out of them while the person was still alive—at sites all over the world. In France, archaeologists uncovered 40 such skulls, dating to around 6500 BCE. While the 1:3 ratio of trephinated skulls discovered at this site was fairly high, what’s perhaps more interesting is that many of them show signs of healing. That indicates the “patient” lived for years after the trephination. Extrapolating from the frequency of healed bones encountered worldwide, anthropologist Yilmaz Erdal of Hacettepe University in Turkey has proposed that by the Bronze Age perhaps half of all recipients survived the procedure.

Fast forward a few thousand years to the mid-19th century. By then, surgeons had more refined tools and anesthesia to work with, giving them the freedom to go deeper into the body. They could try to cure things that they’d never been able to touch before. But there was still a big problem: survival rates from surgery proved to be no better than they were during the Bronze Age. About half the patients “treated” ended up dying from an infection.

Then along came Joseph Lister, a Scottish surgeon who believed that invisible microorganisms were the cause of the infections that killed many of his patients post-surgery. He knew that carbolic acid (phenol) had been used to treat sewage and vanquish a cattle parasite, so he applied the same principle to people. He cleaned his patients’ wounds with phenol and soaked their dressings in it as well. It worked. In 1865 and 1866, the death rate for Lister’s surgical patients was about 46%. From 1867-1870, after he introduced his new antiseptic treatment, it fell to 15%.

Lister’s work revolutionized medicine. With anesthesia and a sterile operating field, doctors could start doing surgery on everything. Even transplantation became possible. Surgeons became gods. But there were further complications.

As Dr. Catherine Mohr, a mechanical engineer and medical doctor, said:

The era of the “big surgeon, big incision” had arrived, but at quite a cost, because they are saving lives, but not necessarily quality of life, because healthy people don’t usually need surgery, and unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that. The question had to be asked, “Well, can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions?”

Enter laparoscopic or “minimally invasive” surgery, which uses long instruments through small incisions—as opposed to the big incisions of yesterday—in an effort to reduce trauma.

It works like this: Each small incision is called a “port,” and at each port a tubular instrument called a “trocar” is inserted. Specialized elongated scissors and graspers, along with a camera called a laparoscope, are passed through the trocars during the procedure. The camera transmits images to a video monitor, and the surgeon manipulates his tools while watching the results on a monitor.

The first laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) was performed in 1987, and since then laparoscopic surgery has experienced exponential growth. By 1999, virtually all gallbladder surgeries used the laparoscopic approach. Today there are a total of approximately two million laparoscopic procedures performed each year in the US.

The reasons for this rapid growth are simple. Compared to traditional surgery, patients typically experience less pain, a shorter recovery period, less scarring, and have a reduced risk of infection.

But once again, the benefits come at a cost. The techniques are extremely difficult for a surgeon to perfect, and during that learning curve the rate of complications increases. Other related difficulties of laparoscopic surgery include the rigid instruments (which have restricted degrees of motion and essentially take away a surgeon’s wrists). They must be held in place for long periods and amplify inaccurate small movements. And the tool endpoints move in the opposite direction to the surgeon’s hands due to the pivot point, which can compromise natural eye-hand coordination (called the Fulcrum effect).

Not to worry, though. Dr. Robot is here to fix all that.

The history of robotic-assisted surgery actually developed in the same time frame as laparoscopy. In 1985, the PUMA 560 robot arm was used to place a needle for a brain biopsy using computerized tomography guidance. But it wasn’t until Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgery System was approved for laparoscopic surgical procedures in 2000 that the idea of robotic-assisted surgery really started to take off.

According to the website All About Robotic Surgery:

The da Vinci is intended to assist in the control of several endoscopic instruments, including rigid endoscopes, blunt and sharp dissectors, scissors, scalpels, and forceps. The system is cleared by the FDA to manipulate tissue by grasping, cutting, dissecting and suturing.

The da Vinci system consists of three components: the vision system, the patient-side cart, and the surgeon console.

1. The vision system includes the endoscope, the cameras, and other equipment to produce a 3D image of the operating field.

1. The patient-side cart has three robotic arms and an optional fourth arm. One arm holds the endoscope, while the other arms hold interchangeable surgical instruments.

1. The Surgeon Console is where the surgeon sits— several feet away from the operating table—and manipulates the robot’s surgical instruments.

The system basically solves the problems associated with normal laparoscopic surgery. The robotic arms are more precise and steady and have no problems holding the instruments in place for long periods. Meanwhile, dexterity is restored thanks to the robotic arm’s flexible wrist; and the fulcrum effect does not come into play because the surgeon’s motions correspond directly to the motion of the instruments. That means reduced training times with superior outcomes.

Today, the system is FDA cleared for a number of surgical categories, and there are about 3,000 da Vinci systems installed in hospitals throughout the world. They performed about 450,000 procedures in 2012.

Not everybody is excited about the proliferation of Dr. Robot, however. Intuitive Surgical faces a number of lawsuits filed by patients who experienced unexplained burns and tissue damage during surgery. Plaintiffs claim that the electrical current used to cut and cauterize tissue arced outside the surgical field, causing damage to surrounding tissue. Though the number of injuries compared to the number of procedures is low, that’s no consolation for the people who have them.

Still, even if Intuitive Surgical ends up paying out huge sums for these suits, they will hardly be a bump in the road for the robotic-assisted surgery industry as a whole. The market is just too big and still relatively untapped.

By our conservative calculations, less than 25% of the laparoscopic procedures in the US today are robotically assisted, and that penetration rate is much lower in the rest of the world. Thus the medical robotic-systems market is expected to grow from $1.78 billion in 2013 to $3.76 billion by 2018, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) north of 16%.

What’s more, existing applications of robotic surgery only scratch the surface. We’re already seeing a rapid expansion of procedures. For example, a robotic system called the “neuroArm” made history in May 2008 after successfully assisting doctors perform brain surgery to remove an egg-sized tumor from a patient. And there’s much, much more to come.

The opportunities in robotic-assisted surgery are exciting for investors because a number of small (mostly yet unknown) public companies that operate in the space are busy innovating and coming up with new tech to either take down the giant that is Intuitive Surgical or to expand the market by going in another direction entirely. We’ve uncovered the one such company that we think has the most game-changing potential.