AI-Trained Surgical Robot Removes Pig Gallbladders Without Any Human Help 31
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: 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 technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerized 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." [...]
In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. "We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy," said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. "In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. "So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously." Currently, nearly all of the NHS's 70,000 annual robotic surgeries are human-controlled, but the UK plans to expand robot-assisted procedures to 90% within the next decade.
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 computerized 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." [...]
In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation. "We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy," said Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. "In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. "So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously." Currently, nearly all of the NHS's 70,000 annual robotic surgeries are human-controlled, but the UK plans to expand robot-assisted procedures to 90% within the next decade.
The MD profession is going to hate this (Score:2)
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This is not gonna happen. It may make mistake and cut the wrong place but as it goes off track too many things will be unmatched and it will revet.Yit's not gonna go crazy off track. And btw human surgeons have done or been caught doing some nasty and crazy shit .. deliberately or by pure negligence.
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I agree. I meant to say that the robot is not going to go nuts and cut people up like crazy like what the people I was replying to were asserting.
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This is not gonna happen. It may make mistake and cut the wrong place but as it goes off track too many things will be unmatched and it will revet.Yit's not gonna go crazy off track. And btw human surgeons have done or been caught doing some nasty and crazy shit .. deliberately or by pure negligence.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a binary choice. Maybe the robot can perform the surgery with a human watching every step, sort of like a Waymo with a human driver with hands near the steering wheel at all times. Or the human can perform the surgery, but the robot can be performing the same virtual surgery and issuing real-time warnings for potential problems.
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This is not gonna happen. It may make mistake and cut the wrong place but as it goes off track too many things will be unmatched and it will revet.Yit's not gonna go crazy off track. And btw human surgeons have done or been caught doing some nasty and crazy shit .. deliberately or by pure negligence.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a binary choice. Maybe the robot can perform the surgery with a human watching every step, sort of like a Waymo with a human driver with hands near the steering wheel at all times. Or the human can perform the surgery, but the robot can be performing the same virtual surgery and issuing real-time warnings for potential problems.
One more possible choice. Have the human perform the complicated, high risk procedures but relegate the lower risk tasks to the robot. This is sort of like an airplane autopilot mode, where the human pilot can relax during the low-risk coasting part of the flight to have more stamina and concentration during the high-risk takeoffs and landings. Of course, this only works if most of the procedure time is low risk.
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The AMA is more of a guild than a union. It does not provide any binding employee representation or negotiation of its members with employers, as a union does.
Mostly, it's just a lobbying organization.
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That's not much like a guild, either. Guilds were organizations that ran the professional standards. They didn't always have any legal powers. Lobbying organization is probably about right for the AMA, though.
Re: The MD profession is going to hate this (Score:2)
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I don't understand why people are so afraid of robots, considering how many errors humans make. Robots can at least learn from their mistakes and from the mistakes of other robots.
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What you say is, in principle, true, but isn't true of current robots. About "a decade from now", though, some of them will probably be better then humans. (Actually, within their specialty, some already are. But the fraction is fairly small, and they aren't the ones that hit the news.)
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Also, medical procedures won't get cheaper. The doctors will just make less on it, so will have to see more patients. The medical equipment manufactures make all the money on this stuff. Hospitals love it because there are a limited number of surgeries, and being able to push more patients though a handful of rooms looks like profit to them.
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I believe this will be handled like self driving cars where F
quite bold to attempt this (Score:5, Funny)
They had some gall.
A step in the right direction (Score:3)
One thing I do wonder though, is if some kind of complication occurs during the procedure, would the AI robot know how to react?
A bit win for capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Healthcare doesn't follow a supply-demand curve. You can't create surplus medical service and have that translate into lower cost for care.
The goal for any medical equipment manufacture is to dominate the market. To become standard practice and therefor the company gets a cut of the profits from every gallbladder surgery. Revolutionizing internal medicine by changing who gets paid.
There is a slight benefit that these devices might make it possible to treat more people even with a shortage of surgeons. But it's going to be priced according to what people will pay. It turns out, people are willing to pay quite a bit their life is on the line. That fear of dying from no medical insurance helps people justify the absurd premiums for health insurance. And keeping the employer as a middle man ensures that most of us can't afford to walk away from our jobs. Capitalism has labor firmly under their thumb.
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The panacea of capitalism (Score:2)
Works for tulips so why not everything else?
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Start saving now (Score:2)
In the future when these automated robot surgeon beds become reality you'll need to be rich enough to afford a house on the space station where they exist.
But what I really want robots to do... (Score:2)
is to wipe my arse and wash me when I'm too old to do so myself. Because this is what is the really udignified part of being old and I would hate to impose on humans to do so... And sounds easier and less likely to go wrong than operations....
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Just buy a fancy high-powered bidet and a chair for in the shower.
Better yet: Combine all the bathroom stuff into a showbidoilet (patent pending)!
Resistance is futile (Score:5, Funny)
It's when they start adding things that we need to worry.
and? (Score:2)
And what is quality of life going to be for those pigs afterwards? Will they have more pain than the pigs who had their gall bladders taken out by skilled human surgeons?
AI Will Remove Healthcare Access for Most People (Score:2)
Quake (Score:2)
Even the Strogg had personnel present and running the automated stroggification surgery equipment. Are we the stroggies?