Robots that have been taught through AI could perform surgery on humans in the next decade after successfully operating on pigs.
A robot arm has been able to remove the gall bladder from a swine with tools that can cut, clip and grab soft tissue.
The machine which was powered by AI – and has similar technology to ChatGPT – had been shown videos of humans performing similar operations.
It then did the same procedure eight more times on dead boars at John Hopkins University, with a 100 per cent success rate that took just over five minutes.
Experts believe that this could mean robots could replicate the skills of humanity’s best surgeons, helping to pave the way for a revolution in health care.
The machines were slightly slower than human doctors however their movements were less jerky and they were able to make shorter trajectories between tasks, the American researchers found.
Mistakes were corrected along the way and different tools were requested for various anatomical differences, the scientists wrote in their paper for Science Robotics.
They said their discovery was ‘a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems’.
A robot arm has been able to remove the gall bladder from a pig using tools that can cut, clip and grab soft tissue
In only 17 steps, the machines were able to cut the gallbladder from the liver, apply six clips in a specific order and remove the organ.
‘We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy,’ the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins said.
Axel Krieger said: ‘In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we’ve done here is really a full procedure.
‘So I think it’s a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously.’
The Royal College of Surgeons called the breakthrough ‘an exciting development that shows great promise’.
While a leading British expert on robotic surgery said that they were ‘impressive’ and ‘novel’ results, adding that it ‘takes us further into the world of autonomy’.
John McGrath said that current robotic surgeries available on the NHS, some 70,000 of them performed every year, are all human led except from bone-cutting on hips and knees which is semi-autonomous.
But plans are already in place to introduce more robotic surgery to the UK’s health care system.
Experts believe that this breakthrough could mean robots could replicate the skills of humanity’s best surgeons, paving the way for a revolution in health care
Heath Secretary Wes Streeting said last month that increasing robotic surgery was crucial to reforming the NHS and cutting waiting times in the next 10 years.
The NHS has also said that nine out of 10 keyhole surgeries in the next decade will be done by a robot, a huge increase from the current one in five.
Dr McGrath, the chair of NHS England’s robotics steering committee, believes that surgeons will eventually be able to oversee several operations at the same time and perform simple procedures like gall bladder removals or hernia operations quicker.
The robots could also be more precise and cause less damage to surrounding body tissue, he said.
However, there are still some steps before this point when considering the robots could react differently to a breathing body compared to the carcass of a dead animal.
Other surgical logistics like flowing blood, fluid on the camera, injuries or smoke from cauterisation also have to be considered.
‘The next step must involve a careful exploration of the nuances within this rapidly evolving field to assess how these findings can be safely and effectively translated into a human pilot,’ the lead on robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Nuha Yassin, said.
‘Only then can this approach move toward, becoming a sustainable model for the future.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .