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NASA Performs Zero-G Robot Surgery for Mars, Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "With rapid-response surgery needed in Iraq and super-long-distance medicine a far-off necessity for a manned trip to Mars, NASA recently sent eight astronauts, roboticists and surgeons on its 'Vomit Comet,' pitting real doctors against new robotic ones. As if the prospect of a portable robo-OR deploying to Iraq by 2009 weren't enticing enough, one of the surgeons on board promised this in his flight blog: 'So far, surgery by hand is still the most efficient way to get the job done in a mobile, extreme environment. But robots are advancing rapidly... The solution that roboticists are working on now is to CAT scan a patient's entire body and beam the results back to Earth. Then a surgeon could program an operation and beam it back to upload into a robo-surgeon, which could carry out procedures like a player piano.'"
"I don't know if I trust a robot to perform surgery on me.. i mean what if it crashes?"
To them I will simply remind you that whenever you go under any type of surgery if the "system crashes" you're dead or at least in big trouble. Having heart surgery? If the pumping machine dies, you go with it. Having tonsils removed? What if the thermal blade(or laser) they are using suddenly goes ape shit and burns you too hot, or misfires? You're screwed.
Point is, its more complex so more things can go wrong. HOWEVER, medical equipment is some of the most reliable and well backedup stuff around.
P.S. What the hell, robots performing surgery but still no sex slaves? god damned capitalism..
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
which could carry out procedures like a player piano.'
... if the patient is not well tuned.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
sternum cut... done. Pericardium incision ... done. Heart stop ... done. ....buffering.....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How do they plan on performing surgery to someone on mars? There is a rather large prorogation delay, even if data is sent at the speed of light, this is not fast enough to perform surgery. Things happen quickly, the surgeon needs feedback, etc. If the surgeon cuts a little too much, he won't know for 10 seconds, after cutting way too much? I'd rather have an untrained pilot (or the doctor they send to mars) perform surgery.
the robot seemed to hold its own--until its compensation software was turned off. "The difference was huge," Kamler says. "It was virtually impossible [for it] to tie a knot."
Well, you try turning off some vital part of the human surgon and see how well he does.
The human surgon did very well until we removed his eyes. "The difference was huge," said the robotic overload. "Not only could he barely tie a knot, but he also couldn't stop screaming."
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
1. use robot surgeon to excise iraq from earth
2. float iraq to mars in zero G
3. use robot surgeon to graft iraq onto mars
4. iraq problem solved!
that's what the article was about, right?
what is this RTFM acronym i keep seeing mean?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunately unexpected things come up in surgeries. Combine this with the impossibility of remote control due the time lag (10 minutes for data to get to Mars, 10 minutes for back to Earth) and I can imagine a nickname "butcher" for these machines.
the co-pay!
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
In Soviet Russia the robot operates YOU!
hmm, most player pianos I'm familiar with aren't full of pulsating liquids and big squishy things -- some of which are rather important -- that move around when you touch them. Not clear the analogy works that well unless there are plans to freeze the patient solid before proceeding.
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
How do they propose to compensate for all of the uncountable variables involved in surgery? Humans are imperfect, messy, squishy things to work on. It would be tricky enough to get a robot to reliably do repair work on electronics that have been out in the field -- let alone to do repair work on nonstandard, moving, ill-defined human parts.
Even if the surgeon back on Earth does a great job and is extremely careful, what happens if some part of the patient moves a bit? A surgeon would see this and make a correction; a robot which did not inherently understand surgery might have a very difficult time correcting without knowing what just happened. (Blood vessel sprang back in the way of the next incision -- which didn't happen on the CAT-scan simulation the surgeon worked on back Earthside.)
I'll take my chances with a local medic, working in consultation with a surgeon at a remote site. Maybe the surgeon could even do the surgery as an example -- but a human should be there to interpret it, at least until we have good enough AI to grok what it is doing.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I don't remember Vonnegut mentioning the fate of that profession in Player Piano. I'm imagining it would have been replaced with machines like everything else but engineering and management. Though reading it in the early 2000s I realized that really, machines will eventually design machines (they already do a fair portion of the work with things like automatic place-and-route), and at least middle management is conceivably replaceable.
Vonnegut's musings on the impact on the human soul aside, it's still pretty exciting to see robotic surgery start to bear fruit. It's a great advance that will help many people, and I think for the time being the surgeon's job is safe since even the best robot isn't doing better than pantomiming specific actions, and are a terribly long way from the reasoning capacity to adjust the plan by itself if there are complications.
On the other hand, it -does- go against my general principle of not giving robots weapons.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm pretty sure this must be an inaccurate way of describing it. A player piano works open-loop.. no feedback is involved. An open-loop surgical robot would simply carry out the instructed movements in a straight-forward way --- no matter whether it's cutting the right tissue or poking a hole in the wrong place.
I think the article is trying to describe a more intelligent robot which actually uses visual and sensing feedback to tell whether it's doing the right thing. (I certainly hope so anyways.) This is not at all like a player piano.
Note that there is a lot of research going on right now in using high-speed communication to allow a surgeon to STAY in the loop. Communication in both directions allows a person to manipulate a robot remotely, and also to feel when the robot is obstructed somehow. Think of tele-manipulation systems for handling dangerous materials, but over a high-speed network.
I imagine the system described here is for when high-speed communication is an impossibility, so they have to program the robots, basically, to be as intelligent as the surgeon himself. A difficult task for sure.
Anyways what the hell is NASA doing research for Iraq for??? Yay military funding.
You want to strap my anesthetised body on to a gurney over which crouches a robot on autopilot with scalpels for fingers and programmed to cut me up? No thanks... I'm ready to die the good old fashioned way...
you had me at #!
Forgive me for possibly being naive, but wouldn't it possibly be a LOT more practical to simply keep a highly-skilled physician on board the mission?
After all, ocean ships have been doing this for hundreds of years. Today, Antarctic expeditions usually have a surgeon on hand, along with a minimally stocked OR, because it's virtually impossible to get anything to or from the interior regions of the continent in the wintertime.
Given that a good portion of the research NASA does is biological in nature, I imagine that there are quite a few individuals who are already qualified for this role. Sending a trained doctor to Mars seems like a no-brainer.
On the other hand, sending a CAT Scan machine up into orbit (and then to Mars) seems hilariously over the top. On the list of big and bulky machinery, CAT Scan machines are pretty high up there. Why not send a locomotive and some track up so that we can drive around on the surface once we get to Mars? After all, they're fast and energy-efficient!
On the other hand, if they were developing a similar technology, but remained focused on keeping it cheap and portable, the applications for it would be HUGE. It'd still be fantastic on the battlefield, and could also be used in remote regions (especially in developing nations) where the local population cannot support having highly-specialized doctors in their area.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I'll wait until Amazon rolls out the sequel to its Mechanical Turk concept, the Mechanical Doc. You pay thousands of people $1 each to perform incisions, clamp stuff, remove this, stitch up that, and voila! Open source surgery! After all, one pair of eyes may not be able to spot a problem but thousands of eyes should be able to correct any ailment.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
They can't be doing this in that big ol' fancy space station they got up there? Hmm, I thought this was the kind of stuff it was built for.
What?
I, for one, can't wait to have my life-saving surgery done with a ragtime score.
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Simply send T-1000's into Iraq. If it moves, kill it!
One of the problems that human surgeons sometimes have when working from CAT scans is that the organs inside the body tend to move around and change shape after you cut it open. As the incision spreads, pressure is relieved and of course fluids can be released, changing the internal geometry. Are they really going to steer the scalpel with the pre-incision geometry?
I suppose for massive trauma injuries, it might be OK, but it seems like interactivity is a pretty strong general requirement for surgery.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Did I get that right, that they want a robot to perform rapid response surgery in space by having it CAT scan the patient, send the data back and wait for a real surgeon to program the actual surgery and then send it back? By the time the CAT scan results arrive on earth, the patient will already be dead. Then again, that makes the robot's work much easier, because he will have a stable, non-moving target to work on, when the surgery data arrives back on mars 4 hours later. Rapid response surgery is something that has to take place within minutes, not hours. The data delay alone makes rapid response on mars impossible this way, let alone the fact that the real surgeon has to perform the operation first. Actually solving the problem altogether is much easier though: Send a physician up to mars along with the other astronauts/cosmonauts, Mars problem solved. Stop going to war with every second oil producing country, Iraq problem solved too.
On a more serious note, unless they plan on deploying these things in the rear lines of Iraq, this is going to turn into another armor and weight versus speed and efficiency battle. If AK-47's can punch through kevlar armor, what are the chances of a mobile-OR robot surviving a some shrapnel? One or two lucky hits can essentially cripple any robot.
Just let me die on Mars without mutilating me with a robot. The damn thing wouldn't even know if I was knocked out or not. Just give me a good supply of morphine in the event of an emergency, I'll make sure I go peacefully. This sounds like doing surgery with a milling machine. When we have human level AI, maybe. A "blind knife", no way.
In the event that I was to die on Mars, I'd request that you leave me there. My corpse would be smiling and flipping you all off from across the solar system.
Link, Therac-25.
you had me at #!
"Please state the nature of the medical emergency."
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
I didn't realise that Iraq had no gravity.
as a physician, i realize how much resource you need to do things that are routine. when i perform surgery, there has to be nurses pre, inra and post operatively. we need anesthesia, sterile equipment,etc. it's amazing what has to run right in order to get things done. you then have to get that into space, and then do surgery? that's going to be an interest problem to overcome.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Sorry you were modded offtopic... it is a funny statement.
Along the same lines it is rumored that California one day will simply go flying off the planet into space by centrifugal force as the earthquakes dislodge all of the earthly connections.
This rumor may have been a metaphor but I am not sure.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Many people are afraid of doctors, and many people are afraid of robots. And a few are hemophobic. Combine all three and you will have a very interesting situation if wakes up in the middle of surgery. Yikes.
There we go. Why oh why do I never use the preview button?
All you need to do is replace the human with a robot human, that way he won't be so squishy, and moving.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
.... will it run Vista?
Have gnu, will travel.
This guy either has 3 hearts or you should take your radio outside.
This is wildly off topic... wait no it isn't. Iraq and Mars in the title are just too excrucuiating for most people who want the a manned Mars mission to happen. Enough already. With the price of Iraq you USians would already be in Mars. For example, with Mars Direct, with the initial price tag of $55 million, you could have set up several missions already (even if the estimate would be doubled or tripled) for the price tag of the Iraq Invasion.
Sadly, I believe that you have a president who really couldn't care less. I don't care what he says in public about going back to the Moon. He probably speaks with his god and god has agreed with him that Earth is the center of the universe
My other SIG is a Sauer.
It seems to me that sending an operating room to Mars to serve a crew of 10 or less is a HUGE waste of taxpayer dollars. With all due respect to the astronauts, Lewis and Clark did not have a mobile OR robot, and they did just fine.
For the millions or billions this system would cost, we could build a couple Earthside hospitals and save some innocent kids or something.
The ONLY possible rationale for building this would be if it would lead to expanded capabilities here on Earth, but I still don't think we should send a CT scan to Mars.
This is another example of capitalism's drive to de-skill the work force. Having lots of highly skilled and highly paid surgeons on staff is a drag to the enterprising HMO's bottom line. Instead the HMO-run hospital of the future will have one or two surgery programmers on call at any one time, being asked to program dozens of surgeries in one day. The modern surgeon will end up just like many machinists did when lathes and mills went CNC, out of work with an obsolete skill (but way more school loans).
The idea of some surgeon in the future programming dozens of surgery robots in one day scares me. Especially if he programs the way I do, copy-paste past bits of code from old projects, but often forgetting to update little things here and there until after the 37th compile. At my engineering job all to often people copy-paste bits from other project's schematics, but miss some part they need to update to make it actually work with the project at hand (thank god we do probably about 15 peer reviews and have field change orders). What if the surgeon is programming an operation and forgets to take out an unnecessary step?
My experience working for a few months as a medical equipment repair tech is that most medical equipment is programmed to shut down if anything is perceived to be out of safe parameters and then get a service call from a tech to check it out. So does this mean that we look forward to surgery robots freezing up in the middle of a surgery while the surgery robot programmer is out on lunch and the nurses are stuck on hold with tech support?
20 years in the future this technology won't be used to improve surgeries in places with few skilled surgeons, but rather to cut labor costs in our metropolitan hospitals. I for one welcome our future robot bean counting overlords and their robot surgeon counterparts.
It sure gives The Blue Screen of Death a whole new meaning!
... in "Blue Screen of Death!"
I've got an idea. How about the troops don't get shot in the first place, lol. If they invented a powerful, mobile force shield generator, they could put it on troops and also use it on spaceships to Mars and it would be a better use of technological investment money.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
. . .welcome our scalpel-wielding remote controlled robotic surgeon overlords. . .er. . .sumpin'. . .
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
Did Bush manage to break the Iraqi's gravity as well?
I find your lack of faith disturbing. Bush decides whether there is gravity in Iraq or not, the same way he decides whether there's a civil war. Implementing the decision is a detail, so minor that it can profitably be skipped.
sudo ergo sum
I think Slashdot mod points are now only handed out to people who are verified to be genetically free of any hint of a sense of humor.
Seriously, lately I've been modded "Overrated" without having been modded up by anyone in the first place. WTF is that about?!
It is easy to mistake subtle humor for a flamebait type of statement if in a hurry to moderate or those who are not in the "know" while moderating.
I am often surprised when reading a post and someone has already modded it funny and it takes a second for the humor to sink in... if it wasn't already marked "funny" then "whoose"... right over my head.
I am constantly impressed with those that do immediately see the humor or the joke/parody that goes into the posts. There are a lot of smart people with quick minds here and then there are some that are not tuned in as well as others might be.
Regardless of the mod points assigned, i enjoy your posts!
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make