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Open Source Robotic Surgeon
GlobalEcho writes "Researchers have created a second version of the Raven robotic surgeon, with open-source control code. 'UW researchers also created software to work with the Robot Operating System, a popular open-source robotics code, so labs can easily connect the Raven to other devices and share ideas.' Unfortunately for them, according to The Economist, 'there is [a] legal problem. Intuitive Surgical, the company behind the da Vinci [robot], holds patents that could make launching a commercial competitor tricky — at least in the immediate future."
... I was at the robotics lab of Polytechnical University, Milano. They already then battled with the same problem: patents lurking, and companies behind them. Patents are in the way of becoming an ever bigger obstacle to innovation. Which is sad.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
A first post ... but i dont have time. I am scheduled for surgery after next apt-get upgrade.
They were created to encourage invention for the good of the public. Now they lean heavily toward the good of corporations instead, benefiting the public far less.
The internet is here. We can share our ideas with the human race faster than ever before, and any one of six billion people can collaborate with any other of the six billion, unlike when patents were invented and you maximum collaborators might be in the dozens.
Will it be integrated in to Facebook or a iPhone/iPad app?
...am I the only one picturing a large metallic Crow-bird saying:
"Ready to operate, relaxeeeeee" (with metallic 80s speech synthesizer sound)
And then the Crow chops the poor chaps innards to pieces.
New Open Source Horror movie in the making...for sure...
a nurse? thats the only open source stuff i am missing in my basement all these days!
Seems like a poor choice for a name for such a system. My first thought on hearing that was this:
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
This is not the troll you think it is. I would never have made a career of coding had I not read the gnu manifesto in 1988, then spent a solid month blowing off my job and damn near getting fired so I could read the emacs source code.
Without patents we would have trade secrets. many vitally important processes and inventions would go to their inventors graves. consider that we have ancient archaelogical artifacts that in some ways are superior to modern products but that we cannot reverse engineer.
Had the recipe for coca cola ever been patented you could make it in your kitchen. only a very few are trusted with the complete recipe, with the chemistry of natural flavorings being so complex no one has ever managed to reverse engineer it.
Patents do not impede innovation they drive it. where would we be had not mp3 been patented? apple would not have invented QuickTime comprssed auipdio and Xiph would not have created ogg vorbis, both of which are better than mp3, because mp3 while not the best would have bend regarded as good enough.
Now I'm not saying that the oaten system is not abused or not in need in reform. what I am saying is that patents must only be granted when they really are novel and unobvious. patents are granted all the time despite prior art being readily at hand, and they are granted when any schoolchild could have thought the invention up with but a few moments thought.
My understanding is that the patent office is paid when patents are granted. every capitalist knows that's the wrong kind of incentive.
Instead one should pay to apply, with substantial, interest bearing bond required for any grant of a patent to be enforceable. when the term expires ones bond is refunded with interest. if so much as one claim is quashed then the bond is forfeited and used for some productive purpose other than just operating the patent office, such as funding an online corpus of prior art.
I'll write this up at more length sometime soon at http://www.softwareproblem.net/social/
Without patents RSA would have Bern a trade secret. while one can reverse engineer circuit chips to fabricate identical chips, to actually understand the physics underlying the design of an IC is far more difficult if all you have is some sample chips and IC reverse engineering equipment.
Patents only forbid cometing implementations not the publication of competing designs. That's why Fremont, California's SourceForge is permitted to provide collaboration tools for the development of the source code that captures only design but becomes infringing only when it is compiled.
Further patents are required to provide a procedure that would enable one practiced in the art to reproduce the invention. That's how all us Webmasters know how Google PageRank works, and that's what enables generic pharmaceutical companies to produce inexpensive yet highly effective medicines once the brand name manufacturers have been repaid for the billions of dollars and decades of blood, sweat, toil and tears required to invent a new medicine that will benefit all of humanity, in many cases for the rest of eternity.
What you are describing is the process of commercialising a product, and also the process of regulation capture. Most of the money invested here hasn't gone to research and development, but has been used to create barriers to competition. So instead of having three or four companies competing for a market we end up with only one. We have created a monopoly and therefore slowing progress in an area that could benefit all of us.
Undoubtedly Intuitive Surgical did invest some money into developing their da Vinci surgical robot, but their machines are big and cumbersome
The point being, the patents that they have are hindering the progress of others developing lighter, more mobile, more agile versions of surgical robots
It's akin to a company that holds the patents are making heavy armoured tanks and because of those patents, nobody can manufacture and legally sell fuel saving cars
It's totally ridiculous !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Hey, all, I know that you'd love to see an open-source robotics device that's every bit as fantastic as the DaVinci, but let's have some perspective here. Intuitive Surgical is not a patent troll. They didn't patent "robots doing stuff in a hospital" or something just as insanely broad. They aren't a company that just sits there patenting things, and waiting for the right time to file lawsuits. They're a real company that genuinely innovated; the DaVinci has revolutionized many surgical procedures, and is unparalleled in the marketplace.
I mean, this is a robot that does joint replacement procedures better than any surgeon an average person is likely to ever have look at them, and in such a way that the recovery time is dramatically lessened as well. Think about that last part, too...in an environment where the debate on health care revolves around how expensive medical procedures are in the United States, here's a revolutionary system that dramatically lowers the cost of some very common and extremely expensive procedures while actually improving the level of health care the patient receives.
Intuitive Surgical is like the Apple Computer of surgical automation, and the DaVinci is the iPod/iTunes system. Other products had existed before, but none had taken the approach that the DaVinci did, and they have been rewarded for their innovation and success. This is exactly, EXACTLY what patents are supposed to do: allow a company that innovates to reap the economic rewards of that innovation for a time. The fact that a commercial company has patented something they invented is not inherently bad.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
From the article: UW researchers also created software to work with the Robot Operating System, a popular open-source robotics code, so labs can easily connect the Raven to other devices and share ideas. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of open source and I use it all the time. But this isn't desktop software, server software, or mobile device software. This isn't mission-critical software, where a bug can mean only millions of lost dollars. This is life-critical software--when it fails, someone dies. That's right up there with nuclear reactor controls, submarine life support systems, fly-by-wire, and such things. NASA knows how to do this right. See http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html for how they do it. In part, they do it by keeping the scope as small as possible and re-defining the term "anal-retentive", from requirements to testing and beyond. Their stuff runs on the bare hardware, not the operating system, because there isn't an operating system in the world that is stable enough for this. The rest of us don't know how to do this right; there are probably less than a thousand people who know how to make software of this quality. If there's an open-source interface that reads data from the machine, I'm all for that. If you can use open-source software to control this thing, I'll make sure that my surgeon _isn't_ using it the next time I go under the knife.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't walk and text.
It's a gimmick. Software that controls medical devices has to be locked down and validated. So maybe it's open source in that you can read the source, and you could possibly even install your own modifications on a device if you could buy or build one, but you couldn't do surgery with it except, maybe, under very carefully controlled (and ethics board approved) research conditions.
There is absolutely zero competition in this field, and I think patents have a lot to do with it. Not only that, the DaVinci system is so entrenched that it will be almost impossible for future competitors to arise. I don't have any direct knowledge, but it is reasonable to assume that the company files more patents every year in association with every incremental upgrade of their products, so I don't see the "limited time period" expiring for a long time, if ever. I first recall hearing of the DaVinci system sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, so the original patents ought to be nearly 17 years old by now, but it doesn't matter.
I also have to say that motives involved in robotic surgery have way more to do with making money than with improving care to patients. The robotic system has some unique capabilities, but in practice it is more often used as a fancy way to do operations that could be done just as well with conventional laparoscopic surgery for much less cost. It is a lot like all the ads for "laser surgery" that were so common in the 1980s and 1990s. It's a classic example of selling things to "buyers" who are not spending their own money. Intuitive convinces surgeons to get trained on the robot by implying that robotic surgeons will get more referrals and patients (and hence income) than those lacking such training. Also, they know that in many respects their system really is fun and "cool" to use, irrespective of any patient benefit. Once surgeons buy into it, they can push their hospitals to invest in the multimillion dollar equipment, again with models showing that the hospital will benefit because patients will go there preferentially. Of course, the same thing gets done at every hospital, so referral patterns really don't change. It's kind of like superpowers selling arms to various third world nations. The net change is that patients get operations that are perhaps a little better or less painful, but definitely much more expensive, with Intuitive taking a big cut of the health care dollars involved.
Another example of patents driving up the cost of health care is with so called "wound vacs", or vaccuum-assisted-closure devices for open wounds. It is a great idea, but the price of the equipment is ridiculous. The patient basically gets attached to a small, rechargeble vaccum system that he/she carries around in a purse-sized bag. The device appears to be about as complicated as a small consumer appliance that might be available at WalMart for about $35, but because it is "medical" and covered by patents, it costs around $2500.
While I agree with much of the parent post, I disagree about the benefits.
Recently one of my aunts needed surgery for a rare pancreatic/liver problem - so rare that her local surgeon felt uncomfortable tackling it and referred her to a doctor specializing in this area at Stanford University Hospital in California - over a thousand miles away. Because of the Da Vinci system, she was able to have the work-up and surgery done in a local hospital without having the costs associated with traveling (flights, hotels, time away from home) and the stress of being in a strange environment at a difficult time.
The parent post seems to be concerned only with how much money a doctor can make from the system, and not the convenience to the patient.
I think you are conflating "OSS licensing" with "community development". The validation of embedded code that you describe has nothing to do with its licensing. If I had, say, a pacemaker, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if the manufacturer released its code under the GPL. I can't see why they would do so, but it wouldn't have any effect on whether the code itself meets the stringent requirements.
Also (being a surgeon who uses robotics), it's misleading to state the situation as being "when it fails, someone dies". The commercial Da Vinci system is very complex, and generates alerts, faults, and warnings quite frequently, for a variety of reasons, although I don't know if any of these are software bugs. When an error condition arises, the machine simply freezes and doesn't respond until the problem is resolved. Unlike a nuclear reactor or an aircraft in flight, if the machine stops working, basically nothing further happens. In nearly all cases, the "worst case scenario" is that the surgeon simply doesn't use the robot and completes the operation with conventional surgery. That's not to say that there couldn't be some unusual circumstance in which a bug would actively cause serious harm, but this is not remotely comparable to controlling a nuclear reactor, although it might be treated just as stringently by regulatory agencies.