Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent Scalpels Through Touch Technology
DullTrev writes: "The BBC News site is running a story about touch technology. Basically, haptics is the science of incorporating a sense of touch into technology. Scientists at the University of Tokyo have developed a sensor which can feel. So you could have a surgeon operating with a scalpel incorporating this technology, the scalpel could push back against the surgeon when he tries to slice and dice an artery. I'm sure there could be loads of applications for this technology - most uselessly the test these scientists have been doing - stopping cutting a hardboiled egg when you get to the yolk..."
This will probably be a great leap for telemedicine. Once it's proven that it can be done, what then?
Nobody's explained how this will improve medicine to have a surgeon hundreds of miles away. Why not have them right there?
Finally, my robot sheep will now push back if they are on the edge of a cliff! ;)
According to the article, it tells the boundary between the objects via the varying conductivities. Interesting. Now, unless I'm mistaken - it's been a long time since I've had any electronics education - you can't measure conductance without applying voltage, yes? If so, this seems like it may not be the most healthful thing possible. Granted, we're probably not talking about much voltage, but electricity and people are just not a good combination. We get enough fried enough because of sitting in front of monitors all day - this isn't gonna help.
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http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
..that surgeons make enough mistakes that something like this is perceived as necessary.
I wanna reach out and feel someone.
...to C.M. Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag" all the time.
His basic premise was prophetic as well. Maybe I should go back and read him again.
There is probably a lot of uses for this touch technology in the sex toys industry. The could make certain toys apply the right amounts of pressure to the right places.
You're Just Jealous Because The Voices Are Talking To Me.
Our company works with haptics in surgical *training*, and I must say that this is both more effective and involves fewer regulation issues. Using haptics to simulate a surgical procedure means that surgeons can train to be better - and then they don't need a computer to stop them from killing me. Heck, it even saves pigs.
How could it be useless to test out something like that? I'm sure something like that would come in incredbily handy when it comes to most types of organ surgery. It'd allow you to only cut at a certain depth through tissue so you could avoid doing any serious damage if anything goes wrong. Whats so useless about that?
most uselessly the test these scientists have been doing
Useless tests?
This is an experimental new tool. The scientists are predicting it can be used to detect (say) the membrane surrounding blood vessels, yet these tests are useless?
It would be both foolish and ignorant to test out an EXPERIMENTAL tool that actually MOVES in a surgical life/death environment. What then could be used to test out its detection of slight changes in membrane? Hello? The layer surrounding the yolk would be similiar to the same one you would see in a vessel...
Difference? If the tool screws up with the egg, then you can have scrambled eggs... the result in a person isnt even half as good.
The surgeon is being trained to keep cutting until the knife warns him that the tissue he's about to cut is important.
So if the knife DOESN'T warn him - even for a couple miliseconds, he cuts right through arteries or nerves.
The potential for trouble is enormous.
And unlike VR built from MRI imaging, there's no indication that a failure is in progress until the damage is done.
I sure hope the authors of any software involved, and the designers of any hardware, are VERY good at building a VERY robust product.
I remember a certain radiation therapy machine, which operated in two modes - one with an attenuation shield, one without it. If you typed too fast on the touch-panel control, it would go through the whole cycle normally, but with the shield OUT rather than IN. Killed several patients before they figured out what was happening.
I hear they had done a marvelous faiure analysis on the hardware. But they had assumed the software would be perfect.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...they're just yoking around.
Millersville University has been working on related technologies.
http://cs.millersv.edu
(too lazy to html in the morning).
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
IIRC, surgeons practice on eggs because they have the same sort of 'feel' as human internals do.
...Or am I thinking of oranges? They have the same properties as human skin, ISTR.
Anyway - would you rather they test this out on real living tissue (e.g. your heart) or on something which is already dead and gives a similar consistency/texture/feel?
I know which I'd rather they try first.
--
Igirisu
Since professional brain surgery is rapidly FTL'ing light-years beyond the clumsy incompetence of mere human surgeons, robot neurosurgeons may soon be able to adapt and adopt this exciting new haptic scalpel technology for the next time one of us Transhumanists needs a minor cranial excavation and rearrangement of our precious neural tissue. The Sensorium Module of the Artificial Mind for Cyborgs may make use of the haptic scalpels in the appendages if not hands of robot doctors.
At the risk of seeming to tie in any and all bionics-related Slashdot articles with the 'shrooming Public Domain Artificial Intelligence Project, let a few independent AI Mind URLs now be adduced to stifle the nattering and snickering of Slashdot anklebiters who don't realize that there's a Technological Singularity going on.
The first Mind implementation is in MSIE JavaScript at http://mind.sourceforge.net/ -- an online AI.
A previous attempt at porting Mind.Forth to Visual Basic was http://www.virtualentity.com/mind/vb/ -- Mind.VB (3.Apr.2000).
A more recent port from JavaScript into Mind.JAVA is at http://www.angelfire.com/nf/vision/ai/mjava.html-- (June 2001).
All these artificial Minds blossoming and proliferating across the 'Net may matriculate at various medical schools, earn a Medicinae Doctor degree, and assist or solo at your next brain surgery with the new intelligent scalpel technology. Now, any comments from anonymous cowards ankle-biting at the footsteps of AI progress?
Well done, congratulations, you get the prize. Now get off my land.
Such technology already is in use to harvest tomatoes. A robot arm can slightly squeeze them and determine the ripeness of a tomato based on the firmness of the tomato. If not ripe, then the tomato is left alone to get some more sun. It's systems like this which can be used to automate farms.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
Aside from serious apps, I wonder if this could be used for recreational weapons and stage props. A sword that cuts everything but human skin would be peachy keen.
Imagine.. you and your geeky Renaissance friends could suit up and smash away with realistic swords and minimal armor- no more dorky duct tape swords, W00t!
Meaning everyone will have two little needles in a box on their desktop, which they can use to feel the texture of a website? My guess is that successfully bringing haptics to the desktop and making them part of everyday usage will not happen "soon", but will take a great deal more development until the same quality of tactile feedback can be translated to, say, a VR glove, and linked to visuals. Even then, in its initial stages, I see few applications beyond some games and pr0n.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Hasn't it occured to anyone that if a doctor is so error-prone, constantly nicking arteries of his patients, that he shouldn't be practicing surgery in the first place?
Just what the doctor ordered.. An electric steak-knife. Sorry, gang, but if a surgeon cant handle a scalpel with any degree of competence, you need to find a new surgeon, not a new scalpel.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
A good surgeon is a good surgeon because of their ability to sense what is going on inside your body as they cut you apart. If you take away the necessity for them to develop their own sense, only to rely an electronic impulse - well why not just use robots to do the whole dang thing. Modify an automanufacturing welding robot to do surgery, get it done in half the time for 1/4 the cost. Sure sounds good. So what if it kills and maims twice as many people, it's progress and it's profitable. Electronics will never replace the complexity and abilities of the human brain and mind.
what about end user support when this thing blue screens. Talk about a general exception fault ruining your day.
I attended a presentation by a French team three years ago, in which they had actually used feedback scalpels in the operating room.
The doctor usually stops cutting well before any feedback is felt, but sometimes it goes near the feedback and overrides it, because his visual inspection is better than the PET scan used to determine feedback levels. The feedback is simply a way to tell a doctor "stop, are you sure about what you are doing?".
They also had samples of robots sawing bones, opening crania and doing, get this, prostate inspections. By the end of the presentation all the males in the room had placed our hands instinctively covering that sensitive area.
Come on those of you who think the onlu use of this is for porn. It looks like a great enabler for those with resricted or total loss of vision. Wouldn't it be great to be able to feel the data in your spreadsheet or feel how your network is performing. However I can't be sure from the article if the breakthrough is the sensor technology or the bio feedback mechinism. slashnik
I'm really skeptical about the possibility of really effective tele-surgery. I'm not a surgeon, I'm an architect. I have a fair amount of experience building models, and I can't imagine building even a so-so cardboard and balsa model with telemedicine equipment. You would think that it's easier to cut and assemble cardboard than to suture an artery. Haptics are critical in getting there, but even in basic modelbuilding there's an astounding amount of very subtle feedback and knife control involved. I have to say, though, that the 'stop and the yolk' work makes a lot of sense as a test for this system.
Or better yet, sensors in my the seat of my pants so I can tell when people are checking out my butt...
It'd be interesting to see this technology applied to the war industry.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I swear this came up already in the discussions about SIGGRAPH 2001. The Researchers who came up with this were showing it off. In response to the earlyy post about electrical currents and such, it doesn't have to be an electrical current feedback, it can use any kind of feedback, optical, density, etc. Basically what this device does is it senses the boundary line between two different substances (i.e. water and oil, white of an egg and its yolk...) and gives them a very strong tactile feedback to keep them from pushing through - however one can override the device and still push through.
I got to try it at SIGGRAPH. As an example they had a small clear tank filled with water and something heavier beneath (dunno what it was...obviously nontoxic though). They handed you a pen to stick into the mixture and try as you like there was no way you could determine where one liquid stopped and the next began simply by touch (the liquids were different colors). Next they let you try with the haptic device. A clear plastic or glass wand the same size as the pen which was connected to a robotic arm. Every time the wand touched the surface of the lower liquid, the robotic arm would kick in and keep you from penetrating it with a fairly strong force that would take some serious concious effort to overcome. Basically the device let you literally feel the line of difference between the liquids, which you would otherwise never be able to dectect by touch. In fact, just to prove how well it worked, they would from time to time bump or stir the tank so that there would be visible ripples in the intersection of the two liquids. The haptic device still worked great at letting you feel the bumps and valleys created. The video/slideshow on the wall behind the display showed the hard boiled egg example among other things. The person wielding the scalpel was able in a single quick cut (less than 20 seconds) cut the white off the yolk without cutting the yolk at all. This could allow doctors to cut through a layer of skin or tissue without cutting what was underneath. It doesn't have to be recalibrated for each and every set of materials used, just the one that it is pentrating. It detects differences in properties (such as conductivity) and won't let you penetrate anything but what you set it to allow you to pentrate.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Attending one of the Universities connected and researching the Interent 2, I can safely say I have heard a lot about it. Achieving the kinds of bandwith and latency required for such things as remote surgery is exactly the goals of the researchers putting their time into this project.
Not only that, but there are other opportunities in "remote" surgery that this technology opens up. What if the specialist could see the surgery and communicate to a general surgeon on the patient's end. If the general surgeon used this haptic scalpel, it could not only enable him to better work in areas of the body he is not as familiar with, but the remote specialist would also recieve a lot more data to diagnose the problem and give the general surgeon instructions. If there are bumps on a heart that the general surgeon doesn't know should or should not be there, a haptic sensor connected to a 3D input device could allow the general surgeon to produce an image map showing the bumps, and the remote specialist could get a 3D image or even better, which could be fed back into another haptic device, allowing the specialist to feel the heart without even putting his hands in the patient's chest.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
LL
There are some commercial companies who have been working in this area for several years.
Most notably Reachin and SensAble.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
Last week in Paris.
Surgeon in LA / Guy in Paris.
They used a LS in Fiber with a DIRECT CONNECTION.
So only repeaters.
Lag time is under 50ms.
So with the haptic interface is better, but today LAG time is not the proble. You only need one hell of a link, but those exist for some very rich people 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I purchased one of these Fu-Fme model V units a while back. I haven't really had much luck finding others with the unit so I spend a lot of my time f**king the software girl that comes with the system. Also, at $499.95US it is a fairly expensive device.
If you are using the pre-1.4 version of the software, make sure you get the 2.1 patch. Early on I had a bit of bad luck and ended up with very minor burns to parts of my pecker.
Anyone else here have experiences, good or bad, with the FuFme unit?
is just the same as any other sense technology. recorded sound gave us the ability to reproduce sound far away in time and space from it's origin. when touch is on an equal footing to this, it will be so commonplace, you won't think of it any more than a photograph, or tape recording.