This robot surgeon can operate without human help

The future of medicine lies in leaving the most complicated operations in the hands of robots, or so they have shown with the STAR robot, capable of making much more precise cuts than the surgeons themselves.

A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University say that, for the first time, their robot has been able to perform a complicated and delicate surgical procedure on a pig without human help. What’s more, the robot even seemed to do the job better than human surgeons.

The use of robots in the operating room is not new, but current technologies in widespread use, such as the da Vinci system, are still controlled by a human surgeon who supervises and directs the operation.

El sistema Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR for its acronym, which is being developed at Johns Hopkins University is different: does not require human help.

“STAR is the first robotic system that plans, adapts and executes a surgical plan in soft tissues without human intervention“Krieger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, said in an email to Gizmodo.

Over the years, Krieger and his team have shown that STAR can perform important surgical tasks as well or even better than human surgeons, although still with some human intervention (they are not 100% autonomous).

In his latest research, published Wednesday in Science Robotics, present data showing that STAR can autonomously perform a complex soft tissue operation in pigs laparoscopically, that is, with only small incisions.

in pigs, the STAR system was able to carry out a complicated and delicate operation cleanly and more accurately than their human counterparts.

In these tests, in which STAR operated on four pigs, the robot seemed to pass with flying colors. Compared to data obtained from human operations, the team reported that STAR sutures and stitches were considered more accurate and consistent.

Neither were leaks detected in the operated pigs, so the operation was considered a total success, even without taking into account that it was a robot and not a human who did the operation.

The team plans to further improve STAR and its capabilities. In current experiments, for example, the robot still required the manual placement of markers throughout the pig’s tissues to help track it.

They have now started work on a markerless approach that should make the robot’s cameras less bulky and surgical planning easier. In the future, our surgeon will be a robot, there is no doubt.