Mark Johnson of The Washington Post reports that researchers from Johns Hopkins and Stanford have developed robots trained through videos to perform surgical tasks like suturing and knot tying autonomously. Even learning to correct their own mistakes during surgeries. This innovation aims to address the U.S. surgeon shortage, offering support to overworked doctors. While robotic surgery is costly, it holds promise for improving surgical efficiency and autonomy in the future. Johnson writes:
They don’t get fruitcakes or Christmas cards from grateful patients, but for decades robots have been helping doctors perform gallbladder removals, hysterectomies, hernia repairs, prostate surgeries and more. While patients lie unconscious on the operating table, robotic arms and grippers work on their bodies at certain stages in these procedures ― all guided by doctors using joystick-like controllers, a process that minimizes human hand tremor.
Now, a team of Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University researchers has reported a significant advance, training robots with videos to perform surgical tasks with the skill of human doctors.
The robots learned to manipulate needles, tie knots and suture wounds on their own. Moreover, the trained robots went beyond mere imitation, correcting their own slip-ups without being told ― for example, picking up a dropped needle. […]
Teaching robots to learn by imitating actions on a video should reduce the need to program them to perform each individual movement required for a medical procedure, according to the researchers.
The team’s training method resembled the approach used in ChatGPT, except that instead of working with words, it employs a language that describes the position of the robot gripper and the direction it is pointing. […]
Scientists and doctors will have to figure out how to handle common challenges of surgery, such as bleeding and improperly placed sutures.
“If a blunder occurs, who holds responsibility?” Zureikat asked. “Is it the doctor? Is it the AI developer? Is it the hospital facility? Is it the robot manufacturer?”
Read more here.
