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.'"

I for one welcome my robot surgeon!

[QuantumFTL]

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!

Great research, but still only research!

[neapolitan]

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.

Re:breasts

[TheMeuge]

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 a "breast clinic" (screening and followup) for about a month and a half. While I probably saw some great breasts, I never felt aroused. Given that I am a very sexually-active heterosexual man, I was amazed at how my mindset was able to adjust itself, and how I was able to strip away my sexuality while I was with my patients. Not that I intended to abuse my position, but I expected that I would have to contend with a distraction, and braced my willpower for the battle. Yet in the end, it turned out that I had no problems being professional... and the only distraction I had to deal with, was a voice in my head, screaming in panic: "shouldn't a resident be doing this?"