Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, say researchers, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help.
The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US.
The Royal College of Surgeons in the UK called it “an exciting development that shows great promise”, while John McGrath, a leading expert on robotic surgery in the UK, called the results “impressive” and “novel” and said it “takes us further into the world of autonomy”.
It opens up the possibility of replicating, en masse, the skills of the best surgeons in the world.
The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used artificial intelligence tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini.
The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics.
The authors from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Columbia universities called it “a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems”.
Almost all the 70,000 robotic procedures carried
out annually in the NHS in England were fully controlled under human
instruction, with only bone-cutting for hip and knee operations
semi-autonomous, McGrath said. Last month the health secretary, Wes
Streeting, said increasing robotic surgery was at the heart of a 10-year
plan to reform the NHS and cut waiting lists. Within a decade, the NHS
has said, nine in 10 of all keyhole surgeries will be carried out with
robot assistance, up from one in five today....<<<Read More>>>...
