Efforts to train robots to perform certain kinds of surgical procedures without human help have reached a "critical milestone" with successful gallbladder removal procedures in lifelike settings, researchers reported Wednesday.
Medical robotics experts at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities revealed in a new study they have "significantly" pushed the envelope on what is possible for robots to do in the operating room without human doctors at the controls, using artificial intelligence to teach them how to overcome unexpected obstacles during surgical procedures.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, described how by using a newly developed AI platform called Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy, or SRT-H, scientists were able to instruct robotic arms to perform eight ex vivo gallbladder procedures "with 100% accuracy" -- all completely autonomously with no human help.
SRT-H is the latest advancement in "computer vision," a field of AI that enables robots to "see" and interpret images and videos, much like humans do. The system was shown videos of human surgeons doing the same procedure on pigs and reinforced with natural language captions describing the tasks. It also can respond to human voice commands during procedures.
