With Robot Surgery, The Future is Now!

Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Advances in Robot Surgery

In science fiction TV shows and movies, medical advances are almost always marked by quick fixes. Getting hurt in the future is healed by a nano-pod of some kind that heals any and all afflictions. One way or another, the health of human beings is placed in the hands of technology. Never has that concept been closer to reality than it is now.

Scientists from Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation have demonstrated that a robot is capable of performing delicate surgery on soft tissue with limited supervision.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, has put stitches into the intestines of four living pigs and all of the pigs have survived without complications.

What’s the Big deal?

You may not think this matters or changes things much. Robotic instruments have been used in laparoscopic surgery for years. That’s true, but this is the first time that a robot has been used to perform a nearly autonomous surgery on soft tissue.

The robot was supervised to make sure it followed the path its computer program put it on, and minor adjustments were made to the thread it sutured with, but other than that it performed on its own.

Until now, autonomous robot surgery has been limited to applications with rigid anatomy, such as bone cutting, because they are more predictable. -Axel Krieger, PhD

More than 44.5 million soft tissue surgeries are performed each year. They’re so difficult because the unpredictable, elastic and plastic changes in soft tissues that occur during surgery, requiring the surgeon to make constant adjustments.  If STAR can consistently perform these surgeries, the medical landscape might be forever changed.

But how good could the robot be?

Considering how difficult and complicated these procedures are, you might assume the robot was a heavy-handed butcher. No such luck.

The robot surgery procedures were also completed by experienced surgeons and the results were compared. The STAR proved to be superior to manual surgery in almost every way.

The only place that the surgeons outperformed the STAR was in the time it took to complete the surgery. Manual sutures took eight minutes, but the robot sutures took 30 minutes to complete.

If you want your surgery done quickly, go to a human, but if you want it done expertly, go to a robot.

For surgeons who might be worried about their job security, Dr. Peter C. Kim has these words of comfort.

The intent of this demonstration is not to replace surgeons, but to expand human capacity and capability through enhanced vision, dexterity, and complementary machine intelligence for improved surgical outcomes.

Source: With Robot Surgery, The Future is Now!