Robot surgery on humans could be trialled within decade after success on pig organs | Medical research

Automated surgery could be tested on humans in a decade, according to researchers, after a robot driven by AI armed with tools to cut, cut and grab soft tissues managed to eliminate the bile bladder of pigs without human aid.

Robot surgeons have been enrolled in video doctors of human doctors leading operations using organs from dead pigs. In an apparent research breakthrough, eight operations were carried out on pork bodies with a success rate of 100% by a team led by experts from Johns Hopkins university in Baltimore in the United States.

The Royal College of Surgeons of the United Kingdom described it as “an exciting development which shows a great promise”, while John McGrath, a leading expert in robotic surgery in the United Kingdom, described the results of “impressive” and “novel” and declared that it “takes us further into the world of autonomy”.

It opens the possibility of reproducing, in mass, the skills of the best surgeons in the world.

The technology allowing robots to manage complex soft tissues such as bile vesicles, which release bile to facilitate digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerized neural networks that underlie the widely used artificial intelligence tools such as GPT GPT or Google Gemini.

The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors, but they were less jerky and traced shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots have also been able to correct the errors on several occasions as they opinion, have requested different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to an article evaluated by peers published in the journal Science Robotics.

The authors of the Johns Hopkins universities, Stanford and Columbia described it as “milestone towards the clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems”.

Almost every 70,000 robotic procedures carried out each year in the NHS in England were fully controlled under human education, with only the bone cut for hip and semi-autonomous knee operations, McGrath said. Last month, the Secretary of Health, Wes Street, said that the increase in robotic surgery was at the heart of a 10 -year plan to reform the NHS and reduce the waiting lists. In less than a decade, said the NHS, nine out of 10 of all lock hole surgeries will be carried out with robot assistance, against one in five today.

In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took a little more than five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 stages, in particular the gallbladder cup of its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and deleting the organ. The robots have corrected an average of a course without any human aid six times in each operation.

“We were able to carry out a surgical procedure with a very high level of autonomy,” Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins, said. “In previous work, we were able to perform surgical tasks such as suture. What we did here is really a complete procedure. We did it on eight bile vesicles, where the robot was able to precision the crushing and cutting stage of the elimination of the gallbladder without any human intervention.

“So I think it is a very great historical study that a difficult surgery of soft tissues is possible to do independently.”

McGrath, which chairs the NHS robotics steering committee in England, said that autonomous surgery, although still years, could one day lead to a human surgeon supervising several autonomous robotic operations at the same time, more quickly carrying out procedures such as hernia operations or biliary vesicle structures.

But he warned that autonomous surgery has remained far from being clinically deployable, because tests on dead pig organs do not test the ability of robots to react to a patient moving and breathing, the blood operating in the field of the operation, an inadvertent injury, the smoke of cauterization or liquid on the lens of the camera.

Nuha Yassin, who directs robotic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said: “The next step must imply a careful exploration of nuances in this rapidly evolving field to assess how these results can be translated safely and effectively into a human pilot. It is only then that this approach can move to a sustainable model for the future. ”

She said that the training, education and safety of patients had to stay at the forefront.