i-Snake, a New Robotic Surgeon

Roland Piquepaille noted coverage of the iSnake Robotic Surgeon which is basically a super flexible robot that can travel through blood vessels and repair the heart. Of course the article isn't exactly clear on what happens if they gain control of the city's sewage system and take over.

Re:Article short on details, title misleading.

[phillips321]

i'm not sure about robot, maybe a machine? but hasn't this already been done?http://www.forumpix.co.uk/i.php?I=1199036905 [forumpix.co.uk]

Re:bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem that people have with Roland is that when he first started submitting stories to Slashdot, the only link he included was one to his own blog, which included only a bit more information than was included in the slashdot summary. On his blog page one could find a link to an article/writeup elsewhere that actually contained information. He was using slashdot purely as a means of driving hits to his own website and nothing more. On top of that, his own writeups often contained misinterpretations of information that was contained in the actual story. In short, he didn't know what he was writing about, yet he was profiting from it. Only after months of people grumbling about this did he start including links to the actual article from the summary without having to go through his blog first. He still includes links to his blog here, but now that we can bypass it, things are much better. However, this being slashdot, people around here like to complain about things long after the situation has been remedied. He often still doesn't know of what he writes, though.

Why it is ground breaking.

[DrYak]

Disclamer : IAAMD, although surgery isn't my main field.

I don't understand why they're calling this device a robot in the first place.

Because, traditionally, all forms of surgery where the surgeon doesn't directly hold the instruments but control them at distance are called "robot-assisted surgery".

In opposition, for example to laparotomy (the surgeons cuts the belly opens and works with his hands and instruments) or to artroscopy (surgeon make tiny hole in the knee, and puts a camera and instruments through the holes) or gastroscopy (a long tubular instrument similar in aspect to the i-Snake goes down the patient throat, the surgeons uses microscopic instruments which are inserted through a tiny channel inside the gastrocope).

In the case of robot-assisted surgery, the surgeons isn't directly interacting with the instruments, but he's controlling them using a separate console. In fact, he doesn't need to be sterile or even in the same room. There are even experiments involving remote controlling the robot over Internet2 across the Atlantic ocean (a big publicity stunt for the ISPs involved, and the hope that one day complicated operations could be achieved remotely by the expert surgeons without needing to fly them to the actual place). This is actually safe, as long as there's a surgeon standing by which could take over the procedure in classical way (-tomy) in case the robotic method fails.

So it's not "robot" in the "autonomous artificial intelligence" sense, but in the sense "remote-controlled machine where the work is done by electrical motor actuator and not the operator's hands".

I fail to see how this device is groundbreaking; similar surgical techniques have been in use for years.

There's two reasons why the device is ground breaking.

The first is a political one : until now we completely lacked competition in the market. The most wide spread robot currently is the Da Vinci [wikipedia.org] by Intuitive Surgical [wikipedia.org] and the problem is that they have bought their concurrent in the field, so they are currently the sole providers for robotic surgery [wikipedia.org] solutions. The surgeon that I know vehemently criticize this lack of concurrence (and slow speed at wich the prices lowers as a result).
A new different company offering surgical robots will likely bring some fresh air in the market.

The second reason is a technological one (that maybe isn't obvious if you don't work in that field).

When looking to Da Vinci's picture, one realises that the robot is a very huge thing.
The basic technique looks like all the different laparoscopic techniques : long rigid instruments that are hold by arms, except that these are Da Vinci's robot arms.
The machine is big, a little bit slow, and takes some time to install and remove before/after each operation.
And the problem is that it can only work inside a big body cavity (abdomen - it is used a lot for different gastroenetrological, gynaecological and urological operations). There's no way you could put a huge thing occupying 1m^3 inside a blood vessel.

This kind of newer generation robots look like tiny snakes. The technique is similar to the different gasto-/colloscopic and angioplatic techniques : it's a long tube with tiny channel in which very long and flexible instruments go.
Except that now the instrument are controlled by motors, AND THE WHOLE SNAKE-LIKE BODY can ondulate and reptate (like the actual animal it's named after) thanks to all motors that control it's body..
This enables a lot of new possibility :
- first it's much smaller than the older robots, so it will probably quicker to set up, and there's more room around the patient for the non-robotic personnel.
- also it could be used inside smaller cavities : the article give exampl

Domain-specific vocabulary

[DrYak]

So an RC car is a robot? Stop redefining words.

I'm not personnaly re-inventing words.
It's just that in some specific field, the word aren't used in the exact same way as the average /.er use them.

In the case of Medicine autonomous A.I. isn't required to call something a "robot" (probably rooted to the fact that for a lot of actions in the medical field, a decision from a formed specialist is always required). In fact with your definition a pacemaker in automatic mode should be called a robot as it can autonomously decide when to fire. It's not the case.

In fact, in the military field as far as I've read, it seems that the word "robot" is also used for a lot of remote controlled device like defusing/demining machine, so apparently we aren't the only one using this king of vocabulary (probably also for the same reason as a human is always mandatory to pull the trigger and that autonomous armed machine were a big no-no until very recently).

Although, about autonomous surgery, there are research into developing techniques were surgeon first train and try an operation virtually on simulation, recording their best performance and restarting the simulation when unhappy, and then have robot "replay" the best scenario recorded on the actual patient. But that won't see the light. Machines performing actions on their own without human supervision is a big taboo in medicine, even if the public opinion seems to tolerate more from machine than humans.