Robot Teaches Itself to Perform Surgical Tasks
Mastering the science and art of performing surgery takes years of study and practice for a human to master. Robots, as it turns out, can learn to do surgical tasks much faster. A new study presented at the 8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning in Germany, introduced the world to a medical robot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach itself to perform surgical tasks as well as a human.
Learning from videos
So how did this seemingly magical robot actually do this? According to Johns Hopkins Hub, the research team from Johns Hopkins and Stanford University used a da Vinci Surgical System in the study. This is a system that is designed to perform some surgical tasks such as dissection, suction, and others while being remotely controlled by a human surgeon. The robot allows the surgeon to work with much greater control and precision.
Using a type of AI training called imitation learning, in which an AI learns a new task by observing and imitating human actions, reported Fast Company, the da Vinci robot was able to learn the very complex set of actions needed to implement a surgical task.
While training the robot, the researchers consulted with practicing surgeons who evaluated the robot’s performance. In addition, to truly test the robot, they essentially presented it with an unknown scenario, a dataset it had not trained on. It was able to perform the virtual simulation with flying colors. This means that the robot was able to generalize, rather than just memorize and would be able to manage the unexpected situations that tend to occur in a real-life operating room.
“It’s really magical to have this model where all we do is feed it camera input, and it can predict the robotic movements needed for surgery,” Dr. Axel Krieger, assistant professor in mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins and senior author of the study, told Fast Company. “We believe this marks a significant step forward toward a new frontier in medical robotics.”
Sooner rather than later
The researcher’s self-taught da Vinci robot is truly a breakthrough. Previously, according to New Atlas, programmers had to go through the painstaking task of hand-coding a robot to get it to perform the action that it was being tasked with. Now, it can be trained to learn a new task in a matter of days. This means that the days of automated surgery may arrive sooner rather than later.
Though the idea of a robot surgeon may seem scary to some people, the truth is that some surgeons have been using robots in the operating room for some time now, and it has only improved the medical field.
Automated medical devices could make high-quality medical procedures and care available in places lacking medical infrastructure. Not every small city, or little town employs top-tier surgeons in their hospitals. An automated surgeon could bring all the skills and expertise of a human surgeon to the people who need them.
