New Delhi, July 10 (PTI) Researchers documented a completely autonomous surgery performed by a robot of the gallbladder bladder made of human tissue with 100% accuracy.
In a paper published in the Journal of Science Robotics, a team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US said that the robot “SRT-H” was trained on a video of a surgeon active in dead pigs.
Systems such as ChatGpt, surgical robot transformer hierarchy, or SRT-H, are equipped with learned artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that support voice commands from the team, just like a beginner surgeon working with a mentor.
“This advancement moves from robots that can perform certain surgical tasks to robots that really understand surgical procedures,” said Axel Krieger, author of Johns Hopkins University and medical robot scientist.
“This is an important distinction that brings us significantly closer to a clinically viable autonomous surgical system that works in a messy, unpredictable reality of real-life patient care,” Krieger said.
The team previously documented laparoscopic surgery performed by a pig robot – the first autonomous operation in a living animal, they said.
However, the robot required tissue that was specially marked for surgical intervention, functioning in a highly controlled environment, and following a strict and prescribed surgical plan.
Researchers said SRT-H robots really perform surgery, adapt to individual anatomical features in real time, make decisions on the spot, and self-correct when things don't go as expected.
They write:
“Our method achieves a 100% success rate across eight different in vivo gallbladders and operates completely autonomously without human intervention.”
The work, they wrote, is “a milestone towards the clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems.”
They added that the robot took longer to operate than human surgeons, but the results were comparable to specialized surgeons.
“This work represents a major leap from previous efforts to tackle some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world,” said Ji Eun Kim, author of the author, a former postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
“Our research shows that AI models can be sufficiently reliable for surgical autonomy.
