Doctors To Control Robot Surgeon With Their Eyes

trogador writes "Researchers from Imperial College London are improving the Da Vinci surgical robot by installing an eye-tracker, which allows surgeons to control the robot's knife simply by looking at the patient's tissues on a screen. Tracking the eyes can generate a 3D map, which in turn can make moving organs — like a beating heart — appear to stand still for easier operation. Other features include 'see-through' tissues on the surgeon's screen (so tumors can be seen underneath tissues) and 'no-cut' zones, places where the robot won't allow the surgeon to cut by mistake. Says ICL Professor Guang Zhong Yang, 'We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.'"

Ah yes ...

but is it a Robot Chicken? If so, it's important to remember that when you're playing chicken the first one to blink loses.

But the real question:

^_^ I foresee an issue with female clients.
"AHHHH! NO, My eyes are UP HERE!"

jerky movement

!!! eye movement is jerky! why oh why would you use eye movement of all things to control a surgical instrament!? good thing that the robot will limit what areas the surgeon can cut

Re:jerky movement

Those movements are called "sacchades" and they are important to preventing retinal fatigue. They're actually fairly predictable and it shouldn't be hard to average them out.

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What if one of the surgeon's assistants is seriously hot and is in his peripheral vision? What gunna happen when the surgeons eyes keep darting to the nurses huge jugs?

I for one welcome my robot surgeon!

Back when I was working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, I was stuck in a basement laboratory. One interesting thing was that there were old robots *everywhere*, including a big old surgical robot right beside my desk. It was really interesting, as it had two 6-Degrees of Freedom "scapel" controls, and a microscope-like magnifying viewer.

I asked some folks about it, and they said that one of the main benefits was that they used Fourier transforms and other filtering to significantly reduce the "jitter" of the doctor's hands, without aversely affecting intentional motions. I thought that was really interesting, and might save a lot of complications. A former boss of mine has a surgeon for a father, and he said it was quite common fifty years ago for them to have an alcoholic beverage before a surgery to steady their nerves, and seems to think this was effective. I suppose the robotic version wouldn't have all the downsides.

I also think an interesting possibility for this technology is plastic surgery - one of the biggest current problems with plastic surgery isn't expense (a lot of things people want aren't that expensive), it's the risk of complication, which can be quite significant. My brother did not get his face repaired after breaking a cheekbone due to this risk.

This would especially be good for individuals who have recently lost a lot of weight - there's a lot of self consciousness about excess skin, and being able to safely remove it with much reduced risk of complications would go a long way towards helping these people feel better about themselves (which is one way to help keep the weight off).

So yes, I for one welcome my robot surgeon. Some day it might save my life!

Precision?

"It shows you the tumour in relation to its anatomical structure," Darzi said. That means the surgeon can be more precise and avoid cutting out large amounts of healthy tissue.

Lack of precision isn't the only reason surgeons remove large amounts of apparently "healthy" tissue along with a tumor ... it's to make sure they get all of it.

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They cut out a fair bit because they simply can't see the tumor... Cutting a safety margin comes on top of that again.

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You would like a good margin around the entire tumor. If you were able to precisely get 1cm margins all around that would be far preferable to getting 1.7 cm margins in one place and 0.1 cm margins in another. As it stands even if the ideal is 1cm, you oft

Skynet, Cylons, etc

We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.

This won't end well.

Great research, but still only research!

I am a doctor that does surgical procedures (mainly pacemaker device implantations).

These kind of devices are very much experimental, and pop up in the news every couple of months (a slashdot search can reveal similar ideas), but quite far away from any sort of typical use. Right now heart bypass surgery is decidedly low-tech, with a surgeon viewing the beating heart with loupe glasses and very skillfully lasso-ing the coronary arteries. It is a great fantasy in the hearts of all doctors to have a machine that offsets any heart movement -- it would make things much easier if reliable. The article doesn't mention that the movement would also have to be coupled with respiratory movement, and have some sort of fail-safe in the case of patient or external movement.

However, standard surgery is still not done using these tools. There are way too many items required to make this feasible in the near future ( 10 years IMHO, although I hope I'm wrong!)

  - Testing: This is literally a life-and-death situation, and any robot "error" in a real person is likely to set the technology back 5 years after it hits the press and hospital review boards. Very, very damaging PR.
  - Education: Surgeons would have to essentially be re-trained to use such a system.
  - Feedback: It is really, really difficult to give an operator feedback on how something "feels." Part of during surgery (no kidding) a surgeon will often run his finger along cardiac arteries -- you can almost "feel" the calcified plaque in a diseased vessel. It would be really hard to approximate anything like this with a virtual robot.
  - Cost: Labor is relatively cheap compared to the capital expenditure to R&D something like this... of course, this will change as time goes by.

Exciting news, but incremental technology.

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Da Vinci is FDA approved and used clinically in a number of hospitals. Robotic surgery for EVERYTHING is a long way off, and I doubt eye controlled surgery will ever be useful, but robotic surgery for some procedures is here now.

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I guess it depends what you mean by "used clinically." These generally are technology expos as part of a clinical trial -- FDA approval allows you to use it on a person, but you can bet that the patient signed a very long form indicating he is part of a r

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In the first paragraph you say that nobody in your centre has done any robotic surgery, then in the last paragraph you mention that the GI doctors have. A "remote device", unless I've completely misunderstood you, is a robot, and may well actually BE a Da

Oh. My. God.

I am so glad I am not a woman with really nice tits.

Re:breasts

Here's a curious anecdote, that I feel is appropriate to the joke.

I was looking for some clinical experience between the first and second years of med school, so I shadowed a surgeon, who specialized in breast tumors, and wound up spending lots of time in

And then a nurse with an unbutton shirt walks in

I wouldn't want to be under the knife at that moment when a gaze is diverted.

Re:And then a nurse with an unbutton shirt walks i

Presumably the software running the show will have safeguards against such transient behavior.

Eye control?

Why? I did some work on development of a surgical robot. Surgeons use their tactile senses a lot, and its important to have 3D haptic feedback. Why in the world would you want to control a robot with your eyes? You can't even tell it how hard or deep to cut.

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The human body is not a machine, and we cannot even come close to mimicking one, let alone thousands to millions.

Why isn't the human body a machine? I'll grant that we can't mimic it but that doesn't mean that the systems of the body aren't mechanical in nature. Would you argue against using titanium rods to help with fractures, the use of plastic joints to replac

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The human body is not a machine, and we cannot even come close to mimicking one, let alone thousands to millions.

Wasn't that the whole point with using a machine?

A human can only hold a knife so still and accurate where a machine could cut on an accuracy s

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I feel this is going in the opposite direction of what I hope for medicine. Distancing doctors from patients, and life from reality may prove a nasty combo.

Well, it's a good thing most of us aren't hoping for the same things you are. Most sophisticated

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Well, it's a good thing most of us aren't hoping for the same things you are. Most sophisticated medical technology "distances" a doctor from his patient to some degree ... like, for example, a stethoscope. Should a doctor be required to press his ears aga

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On a more ethical standpoint, being interested in Medicine and Machines myself, I feel this is going in the opposite direction of what I hope for medicine. Distancing doctors from patients, and life from reality may prove a nasty combo.

First, you need some distance. If you are in respiratory failure, I have precious little time to get you intubated and ventilated. That is not the time you want active listening and human touch. You want technical skill and someone who does not dick aroun

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Now that's a good, traditional British name. Wonder what his family crest looks like.

You've never heard the phrase 'a good Englishman is 99% foreign'?

My Family are English, and have lived in the UK for centuries, yet my Surname is Nordic. Extremely so in f