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i-Snake, a New Robotic Surgeon
Roland Piquepaille noted coverage of the iSnake Robotic Surgeon which is basically a super flexible robot that can travel through blood vessels and repair the heart. Of course the article isn't exactly clear on what happens if they gain control of the city's sewage system and take over.
I don't understand why they're calling this device a robot in the first place. It doesn't operate in even a semi-autonomous fashion, at least given the information found in the (very sparse) linked article. I fail to see how this device is groundbreaking; similar surgical techniques have been in use for years. If somebody has a better link, or at least one that doesn't sound like a fluffed-up ad, please help me out here.
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There's a monster in my pants
And it does a dirty dance
ooo monster get away monster
As long as they don't call it McSnaky I'll be fine.
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I had to wipe tears of laughter from my eyes when I notice one of the tags for this article: :"ohnoitsroland"
To anyone who doesn't get it, don't worry... hang around here for a little longer and you'll understand. That tag just made my day a little brighter.
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i-Shake
a more advanced form of angioplasty...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angioplasty
rotorooter thats the name and away goes troubles down the drain...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If someone's blood vessel is plugged up with cholesterol, wouldn't a snake get stuck and kill them? And if they break the chunk off that could easily cause a stroke. Plus a big snake stuck in your heart doesn't sound too safe either. And what if it doesn't want to get out and causes a hostage situation? Then what?
Btw wtf is everyone's problem with Roland? Maybe I haven't been around long enough but my only problem is I can't pronounce his retarded last name and he looks like a douche.
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It's just downright coincidental that the article describes technology that closely resembles endoscopy, right?
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Or worse, if they make a movie of that...
oh, wait...
I'm a doctor, and I can't pick up chicks in bars over the weekend!
"- No ! The Robot missed the surgery operation ! - Oh my god ! Snake, Snake, Snaaaakkkkeee !"
Can you imagine having a Beowulf Cluster of these shoved up your ass?
of all these motherfucking isnakes in my motherfuckin body!
This time(well, currently) they seperated his BS from a BBC link.
I think we need a custom snake for Pigpail, one that expands enormously once inserted into the vein.
It's pretty evident that he either doesn't understand the subjects he writes about or that he doesn't care about the truth. Decide for yourself which is worse.
Plus he was and is a close associate of saboteur, bitchslapper and domain hijacker Michael Sims; that alone is reason enough to despise him.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Finally, someone has invented the mending apparatus, except they mend people, instead of The Machine.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Because, traditionally, all forms of surgery where the surgeon doesn't directly hold the instruments but control them at distance are called "robot-assisted surgery".
In opposition, for example to laparotomy (the surgeons cuts the belly opens and works with his hands and instruments) or to artroscopy (surgeon make tiny hole in the knee, and puts a camera and instruments through the holes) or gastroscopy (a long tubular instrument similar in aspect to the i-Snake goes down the patient throat, the surgeons uses microscopic instruments which are inserted through a tiny channel inside the gastrocope).
In the case of robot-assisted surgery, the surgeons isn't directly interacting with the instruments, but he's controlling them using a separate console. In fact, he doesn't need to be sterile or even in the same room. There are even experiments involving remote controlling the robot over Internet2 across the Atlantic ocean (a big publicity stunt for the ISPs involved, and the hope that one day complicated operations could be achieved remotely by the expert surgeons without needing to fly them to the actual place). This is actually safe, as long as there's a surgeon standing by which could take over the procedure in classical way (-tomy) in case the robotic method fails.
So it's not "robot" in the "autonomous artificial intelligence" sense, but in the sense "remote-controlled machine where the work is done by electrical motor actuator and not the operator's hands".
There's two reasons why the device is ground breaking.
:
The first is a political one : until now we completely lacked competition in the market. The most wide spread robot currently is the Da Vinci by Intuitive Surgical and the problem is that they have bought their concurrent in the field, so they are currently the sole providers for robotic surgery solutions. The surgeon that I know vehemently criticize this lack of concurrence (and slow speed at wich the prices lowers as a result).
A new different company offering surgical robots will likely bring some fresh air in the market.
The second reason is a technological one (that maybe isn't obvious if you don't work in that field).
When looking to Da Vinci's picture, one realises that the robot is a very huge thing.
The basic technique looks like all the different laparoscopic techniques : long rigid instruments that are hold by arms, except that these are Da Vinci's robot arms.
The machine is big, a little bit slow, and takes some time to install and remove before/after each operation.
And the problem is that it can only work inside a big body cavity (abdomen - it is used a lot for different gastroenetrological, gynaecological and urological operations). There's no way you could put a huge thing occupying 1m^3 inside a blood vessel.
This kind of newer generation robots look like tiny snakes. The technique is similar to the different gasto-/colloscopic and angioplatic techniques : it's a long tube with tiny channel in which very long and flexible instruments go.
Except that now the instrument are controlled by motors, AND THE WHOLE SNAKE-LIKE BODY can ondulate and reptate (like the actual animal it's named after) thanks to all motors that control it's body..
This enables a lot of new possibility
- first it's much smaller than the older robots, so it will probably quicker to set up, and there's more room around the patient for the non-robotic personnel.
- also it could be used inside smaller cavities : the article give exampl
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I'm rather annoyed with companies these days. Are you fucking Apple? NO!!! Then don't make an iProduct, if not that, then because prepending 'i' infront of 'x word in the dictionary' is fucking stupid in the first place, you consumerist whore.
Not posted AC, bitches.
(last explitive added to spite the lameness filter)
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I assume that iSnake will lock itself to a particular health insurance provider, still to be announced by the manufacturer, and will be bricked on software updates if found to be unlocked?
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I didn't know there were cheaper places around to get some surgery done...
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Of course, one of the major reasons why endovascular microsurgical technology hasn't caught on yet is all the blood that gets in the way. Hey, it sort of cuts down on visual acuity. If you were to attempt to operate endoscopically on a cardiac valve, you would need to either do things under radiologic control (quite limiting) or under direct vision (such as thru fiberoptics). But you need to move the blood out of the way to be successful and no one has come up with a good way of doing this yet without cardiac bypass.
RM
Im Sitting Here On An Excercycle And Almost Hit The Handlebars from laughing at that. Like most other people I didnt see Snakes on a plane but damn, I can imagine "I have had it with these MF Snakes in this MF Brain!" lol. Thanks for a laugh.
---
Seems like iSnake would be a better name for a robotic lawyer... rimshot!
I'm not personnaly re-inventing words.
It's just that in some specific field, the word aren't used in the exact same way as the average
In the case of Medicine autonomous A.I. isn't required to call something a "robot" (probably rooted to the fact that for a lot of actions in the medical field, a decision from a formed specialist is always required). In fact with your definition a pacemaker in automatic mode should be called a robot as it can autonomously decide when to fire. It's not the case.
In fact, in the military field as far as I've read, it seems that the word "robot" is also used for a lot of remote controlled device like defusing/demining machine, so apparently we aren't the only one using this king of vocabulary (probably also for the same reason as a human is always mandatory to pull the trigger and that autonomous armed machine were a big no-no until very recently).
Although, about autonomous surgery, there are research into developing techniques were surgeon first train and try an operation virtually on simulation, recording their best performance and restarting the simulation when unhappy, and then have robot "replay" the best scenario recorded on the actual patient. But that won't see the light. Machines performing actions on their own without human supervision is a big taboo in medicine, even if the public opinion seems to tolerate more from machine than humans.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Snake robot, a very creative name indeed for a medical device!! listen_to_slashdot
$10 says Apple has a fit over them calling it something prefixed with an i.