Latest news with #autonomousSurgery
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Health
- Daily Mail
AI-trained robots 'to be undertaking surgery on humans in the coming years' after success with PIGS
Robots that have been taught through AI could perform surgery on humans in the next decade after successfully operating on pigs. A robot arm has been able to remove the gall bladder from a swine with tools that can cut, clip and grab soft tissue. The machine which was powered by AI - and has similar technology to ChatGPT - had been shown videos of humans performing similar operations. It then did the same procedure eight more times on dead boars at John Hopkins University, with a 100 per cent success rate that took just over five minutes. Experts believe that this could mean robots could replicate the skills of humanity's best surgeons, helping to pave the way for a revolution in health care. The machines were slightly slower than human doctors however their movements were less jerky and they were able to make shorter trajectories between tasks, the American researchers found. Mistakes were corrected along the way and different tools were requested for various anatomical differences, the scientists wrote in their paper for Science Robotics. They said their discovery was 'a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems'. In only 17 steps, the machines were able to cut the gallbladder from the liver, apply six clips in a specific order and remove the organ. 'We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy,' the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins said. Axel Krieger said: 'In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we've done here is really a full procedure. 'So I think it's a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously.' The Royal College of Surgeons called the breakthrough 'an exciting development that shows great promise'. While a leading British expert on robotic surgery said that they were 'impressive' and 'novel' results, adding that it 'takes us further into the world of autonomy'. John McGrath said that current robotic surgeries available on the NHS, some 70,000 of them performed every year, are all human led except from bone- cutting on hips and knees which is semi-autonomous. But plans are already in place to introduce more robotic surgery to the UK's health care system. Heath Secretary Wes Streeting said last month that increasing robotic surgery was crucial to reforming the NHS and cutting waiting times in the next 10 years. The NHS has also said that nine out of 10 keyhole surgeries in the next decade will be done by a robot, a huge increase from the current one in five. Dr McGrath, the chair of NHS England's robotics steering committee, believes that surgeons will eventually be able to oversee several operations at the same time and perform simple procedures like gall bladder removals or hernia operations quicker. The robots could also be more precise and cause less damage to surrounding body tissue, he said. However, there are still some steps before this point when considering the robots could react differently to a breathing body compared to the carcass of a dead animal. Other surgical logistics like flowing blood, fluid on the camera, injuries or smoke from cauterisation also have to be considered. 'The next step must involve a careful exploration of the nuances within this rapidly evolving field to assess how these findings can be safely and effectively translated into a human pilot,' the lead on robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Nuha Yassin, said. 'Only then can this approach move toward, becoming a sustainable model for the future.'
CTV News
5 days ago
- Health
- CTV News
AI-powered robot perfectly performs surgery after being trained by videos
Sorry, we're having trouble with this video. Please try again later. [5006/404] For the first time ever, a robot has performed a realistic surgery without human help. According to a new study, the AI-powered robot precisely executed a complex part of a gallbladder removal after being trained by videos of human surgeons. Led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the study found that the robot's performance was 'comparable to an expert surgeon' during trials on pig gallbladders. 'This advancement moves us from robots that can execute specific surgical tasks to robots that truly understand surgical procedures,' corresponding author and medical roboticist Axel Krieger said in a news release. 'This is a critical distinction that brings us significantly closer to clinically viable autonomous surgical systems that can work in the messy, unpredictable reality of actual patient care.' While Krieger and colleagues have trained robots to perform specific surgical tasks in the past, this was the first time that one was able to operate autonomously without a predetermined plan. Rather than teaching a robot to follow a mapped route, Krieger likened their latest breakthrough to 'teaching a robot to navigate any road, in any condition, responding intelligently to whatever it encounters.' The robot was also able to learn from and respond to voice commands from the team, much like a novice surgeon working under supervision of a mentor. After being trained, the robot operated autonomously on eight pig gallbladders, performing perfectly without any human intervention. 'To me it really shows that it's possible to perform complex surgical procedures autonomously,' Krieger, an associate professor in mechanical engineering, said. 'This is a proof of concept that it's possible and this imitation learning framework can automate such complex procedure with such a high degree of robustness.' 'Comparable to an expert surgeon' Although the robot took longer than a human surgeon, researchers say it had a 100 per cent success rate in all eight surgeries and was able to adapt to different pig gallbladders and unexpected scenarios, like when its starting position was moved. On average it took the robot five minutes and 17 seconds to complete the required tasks, compared to about four minutes for a human surgeon. 'In these experiments, we observe the consistent ability of our framework to generalize to unseen anatomies and self-correct its own behaviour,' an advance copy of the study explained. 'Preliminary comparison shows that, while our framework requires more operation time, the performance is comparable to an expert surgeon.' Using the typically human-operated robotic da Vinci Surgical System, the robot was built and trained with the same machine learning architecture that drives ChatGPT. 'Our work shows that AI models can be made reliable enough for surgical autonomy – something that once felt far-off but is now demonstrably viable,' lead author and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Ji Woong 'Brian' Kim said in the news release. Warning: some readers may find the following image disturbing. Surgical Robot The surgical robot performing a gallbladder surgery. (Juo-Tung Chen/Johns Hopkins University) The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. The gallbladder removal procedure required a string of 17 tasks that included identifying certain ducts and arteries in order to place clips and sever parts with scissors. The researchers would now like to train and test the surgical robot for other types of procedures and to eventually perform a completely autonomous surgery. 'Autonomous surgery holds immense potential for improving surgical outcomes, reducing costs, and expanding access to high-quality healthcare,' the study said. '[Our] approach also supports real-time language interventions from expert surgeons, making it practical for potential integration into hospitals as a tool for surgeons to reduce fatigue on simple procedures or for areas with no access to trained surgeons.'
