Surgical robots take step towards fully autonomous operations

> An AI-powered robot was able to remove a gall bladder from a dead pig in what researchers claim is the first realistic surgery by a machine with almost no human intervention.

> The robot is powered by a two-tier AI system trained on 17 hours of video encompassing 16,000 motions made in operations by human surgeons. When put to work, the first layer of the AI system watches video from an endoscope monitoring the surgery and issues plain-language instructions, such as “clip the second duct”, while the second AI layer turns each instruction into three-dimensional tool motions.

> In all, the gall bladder surgery required 17 separate tasks. The robotic system performed the operation eight times, achieving 100 per cent success in all of the tasks.

> For one thing, while the robot completed the task with 100 per cent success, it had to self-correct six times per case. For example, this could mean a gripper designed to grasp an artery missed its hold on the first try.

> “There were a lot of instances where it had to self-correct, but this was all fully autonomous,” says Krieger. “It would correctly identify the initial mistake and then fix itself.” The robot also had to ask a human to change one of its surgical instruments for another, meaning some level of human intervention was required.
DOI:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adt5254

Personally I do not find a 100% success rate plausible with amount of corrections suggested it had to make, high 90s perhaps, however I am definitively looking forward to the implementation of this apparatus alongside the current precision surgical platforms such as DaVinci and more! ❤️