Robot Surgeons to put Human Docs out of Work

Michael Reilly — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:30:00 PDT

The next time you have to go under the knife, a robot may be doing the cutting. Engineers at Duke University are pushing the envelope of cutting edge surgery with a robot arm they've built that can perform simple procedures all by itself. The system guides itself using 3-d ultrasound imaging as its eyes, and has shown it can accurately guide two needle probes through tissue in a simulated biopsy and blood vessel graft. The bot's still in its experimental phase, but ultrasound specialist Stephen Smith and his research team believe the day is near when robots will autonomously conduct surgery without the need for human guidance.

Together with the recent development of an automatic anesthesia machine, the automated robot surgeon presents an eerie prospect for the operating room of tomorrow: it may be completely uninhabited by people except you, the patient. Perhaps a technician will look on from behind a two-way mirror; perhaps not.

There's a long way to go before that happens. For example, robots will have to learn to adapt to unforeseen complications during surgery. But what would you think if the OR at your local hospital looked more like an assembly line at General Motors and less like a place where people are healed? Would you trust a robot to cut you apart then sew you back up, good as new?

Source: PhysOrg

Image: Medgadget

Meet McSleepy, the World's First Robot Anesthesiologist

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:39:34 PDT

Anesthesiologists are required to participate in every surgery, standing by to administer drugs and monitor the patient's vital signs while surgeons do their jobs. But now a group of researchers at Montreal's McGill University have invented a device that could replace human anesthesiologists with robots in the next five years. An anesthesia bot called McSleepy has just successfully completed its first surgery, administering drugs to a patient undergoing a tumor removal on his kidney.

McGill anesthesiologist Thomas M. Hemmerling, who helped develop McSleepy, says:

We have been working on closed-loop systems, where drugs are administered, their effects continuously monitored, and the doses are adjusted accordingly, for the last five years. Think of "McSleepy" as a sort of humanoid anesthesiologist that thinks like an anesthesiologist, analyses biological information and constantly adapts its own behavior, even recognizing monitoring malfunction.

Given that anesthesia can be one of the most potentially deadly parts of an operation, I'm curious about how hospitals will handle insurance for McSleepy. Or malpractice suits. This is probably less of an issue in places like Canada than in the U.S., which has a really litigious culture around malpractice issues. Maybe that means McSleepy will never make his way over stateside.

I still can't decide if I'd feel safer or less safe with a robot monitoring my anesthesia. At least it wouldn't fall prey to human error — only to operating system crashes.

McGill News via The Biotech Weblog

io9: anesthesia

Robot Surgeons to put Human Docs out of Work

Meet McSleepy, the World's First Robot Anesthesiologist