We did not acquire flying cars in the twenty-first century, but we did get robot surgeons. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have achieved a breakthrough by successfully training a robot to do autonomous laparoscopic surgery on a pig.
The accomplishment was announced by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University on Wednesday, when the robot successfully completed laparoscopic surgery on a pig for the first time in human history.
The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), a robot surgeon, beat even human surgeons in intestinal surgery, which needed high degrees of repetitive motion and precision to connect two ends of an intestine, as well as high-precision suturing.
The team has been training its Smart Tissue Automated Robot (STAR) for years; in 2018, the robot successfully conducted a semi-autonomous laparoscopic surgery, and now it has done a fully autonomous surgery.
In a statement released on Tuesday, Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, commented on the procedure’s accuracy, “The STAR performed the procedure on four animals and it produced significantly better results than humans performing the same procedure.”
Even for human surgeons, laparoscopic surgery on soft tissue systems has proven to be particularly difficult, since it necessitates quick modifications without creating big incisions in the stomach in the event that something moves or the surgeon faces an unforeseen obstacle.
Robot-assisted operations have been taking place around the world for a while now; according to one estimate, the number of robotics-assisted surgeries reached 644,000 in 2017, but they’ve all been aided in part by human doctors.
The advantage of STAR is not only its adaptability, but also the precision and reproducibility that comes with robotics. STAR has been meticulously constructed to carry out a soft tissue surgical plan with minimal human interaction.
The researchers hope that autonomous surgery will eliminate human flaws like hand tremors, hesitating, doubt, and anxiety from surgical procedures.
In terms of the future of autonomous robot surgery, it appears that we are on the verge of a robot revolution. Krieger went on to say that in the not-too-distant future, he may see a robot performing trauma surgery on the battlefield.
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