Image by Juo-Tung Chen/Johns Hopkins University
An AI-controlled robot has autonomously completed a gallbladder removal with “100 percent accuracy.”
The procedure, conducted by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers, demonstrated the power of AI, which allowed the robot to make independent decisions and adapt to unexpected complications on the fly. (You might be relieved to learn, though, that the surgery was conducted on a hyper-detailed manequin with realistically-textured internal organs, not a living human patient.)
The accomplishment is still pretty impressive. The surgical robot acted like a self-driving car that can “navigate any road, in any condition, responding intelligently to whatever it encounters,” as Johns Hopkins research lead Axel Krieger said in a statement about the feat.
The procedure could set an important precedent as robotic surgeons become more commonplace in the operating room. While remotely controlled surgery robots have been around for decades, scientists are only starting to develop AI-guided ones that can make their own decisions independently of a human operator.
“This work represents a major leap from prior efforts because it tackles some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world,” said lead author and Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Ji Woong Kim in the statement.
“Our work shows that AI models can be made reliable enough for surgical autonomy—something that once felt far-off but is now demonstrably viable,” he added.
The robot, dubbed SRT-H, was trained on videos of surgeons performing similar gallbladder removal surgeries on dead pigs, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics this week.
The robot carefully removed the gallbladder, a tiny organ that concentrates bile and digestive fluids, from the liver by “grabbing, clipping, and cutting.”
“Our method achieves a 100 percent success rate across eight different ex vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention,” the paper reads. “This work demonstrates step-level autonomy in a surgical procedure, marking a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems.”
The robot’s still considerably slower than a human surgeon, leaving room for improvement. But the researchers see their latest success as a major stepping stone.
“To me it really shows that it’s possible to perform complex surgical procedures autonomously,” Krieger said in the press release. “This is a proof of concept that it’s possible and this imitation learning framework can automate such complex procedure with such a high degree of robustness.”
Krieger and his colleagues are now looking for ways to teach the robot different types of procedures beyond gallbladder removals, and achieve the first fully autonomous surgery that requires no intervention.
More on robot surgeons: Robot Performs First Ever Fully Autonomous Dental Surgery on Live Patient
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