Autonomous robot performs first realistic surgery without human help
According to a new study, the AI-powered robot precisely executed a complex part of a gallbladder removal after being trained by videos of human surgeons. Led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the study found that the robot's performance was 'comparable to an expert surgeon' during trials on pig gallbladders.
'This advancement moves us from robots that can execute specific surgical tasks to robots that truly understand surgical procedures,' corresponding author and medical roboticist Axel Krieger said in a news release. 'This is a critical distinction that brings us significantly closer to clinically viable autonomous surgical systems that can work in the messy, unpredictable reality of actual patient care.'
While Krieger and colleagues have trained robots to perform specific surgical tasks in the past, this was the first time that one was able to operate autonomously without a predetermined plan. Rather than teaching a robot to follow a mapped route, Krieger likened their latest breakthrough to 'teaching a robot to navigate any road, in any condition, responding intelligently to whatever it encounters.'
The robot was also able to learn from and respond to voice commands from the team, much like a novice surgeon working under supervision of a mentor. After being trained, the robot operated autonomously on eight pig gallbladders, performing perfectly without any human intervention.
'To me it really shows that it's possible to perform complex surgical procedures autonomously,' Krieger, an associate professor in mechanical engineering, said. '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.'
'Comparable to an expert surgeon'
Although the robot took longer than a human surgeon, researchers say it had a 100 per cent success rate in all eight surgeries and was able to adapt to different pig gallbladders and unexpected scenarios, like when its starting position was moved. On average it took the robot five minutes and 17 seconds to complete the required tasks, compared to about four minutes for a human surgeon.
'In these experiments, we observe the consistent ability of our framework to generalize to unseen anatomies and self-correct its own behaviour,' an advance copy of the study explained. 'Preliminary comparison shows that, while our framework requires more operation time, the performance is comparable to an expert surgeon.'
Using the typically human-operated robotic da Vinci Surgical System, the robot was built and trained with the same machine learning architecture that drives ChatGPT.
'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,' lead author and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral researcher Ji Woong 'Brian' Kim said in the news release.
Warning: some readers may find the following image disturbing.
Surgical Robot
The surgical robot performing a gallbladder surgery. (Juo-Tung Chen/Johns Hopkins University)
The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.
The gallbladder removal procedure required a string of 17 tasks that included identifying certain ducts and arteries in order to place clips and sever parts with scissors. The researchers would now like to train and test the surgical robot for other types of procedures and to eventually perform a completely autonomous surgery.
'Autonomous surgery holds immense potential for improving surgical outcomes, reducing costs, and expanding access to high-quality healthcare,' the study said. '[Our] approach also supports real-time language interventions from expert surgeons, making it practical for potential integration into hospitals as a tool for surgeons to reduce fatigue on simple procedures or for areas with no access to trained surgeons.'
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