Doctors To Control Robot Surgeon With Their Eyes

trogador writes "Researchers from Imperial College London are improving the Da Vinci surgical robot by installing an eye-tracker, which allows surgeons to control the robot's knife simply by looking at the patient's tissues on a screen. Tracking the eyes can generate a 3D map, which in turn can make moving organs — like a beating heart — appear to stand still for easier operation. Other features include 'see-through' tissues on the surgeon's screen (so tumors can be seen underneath tissues) and 'no-cut' zones, places where the robot won't allow the surgeon to cut by mistake. Says ICL Professor Guang Zhong Yang, 'We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.'"

Comments

Great research, but still only research!

[neapolitan]

I am a doctor that does surgical procedures (mainly pacemaker device implantations).

These kind of devices are very much experimental, and pop up in the news every couple of months (a slashdot search can reveal similar ideas), but quite far away from any sort of typical use. Right now heart bypass surgery is decidedly low-tech, with a surgeon viewing the beating heart with loupe glasses and very skillfully lasso-ing the coronary arteries. It is a great fantasy in the hearts of all doctors to have a machine that offsets any heart movement -- it would make things much easier if reliable. The article doesn't mention that the movement would also have to be coupled with respiratory movement, and have some sort of fail-safe in the case of patient or external movement.

However, standard surgery is still not done using these tools. There are way too many items required to make this feasible in the near future ( 10 years IMHO, although I hope I'm wrong!)

  - Testing: This is literally a life-and-death situation, and any robot "error" in a real person is likely to set the technology back 5 years after it hits the press and hospital review boards. Very, very damaging PR.
  - Education: Surgeons would have to essentially be re-trained to use such a system.
  - Feedback: It is really, really difficult to give an operator feedback on how something "feels." Part of during surgery (no kidding) a surgeon will often run his finger along cardiac arteries -- you can almost "feel" the calcified plaque in a diseased vessel. It would be really hard to approximate anything like this with a virtual robot.
  - Cost: Labor is relatively cheap compared to the capital expenditure to R&D something like this... of course, this will change as time goes by.

Exciting news, but incremental technology.