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Title: AI-Trained Surgical Robot Removes Pig Gallbladders Without Any Human
Help

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/07/10/...

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.

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