Slashdot Mirror
Robot Stitches Tissue By Itself Without A Real Doctor Pulling The Strings (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have created a robotic system that is capable of stitching up tissue in living animals without a human doctor pulling the strings. Wednesday's research brings us one step closer toward autonomous surgical robots. While doctors did supervise the robot, the robot performed as well, and in some cases a bit better, as some competing surgeons in stitching together intestinal tissue of pigs used in the tests. Wednesday's project is "the first baby step toward true autonomy," said Dr. Umamaheswar Duvvuri of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He cautioned others to not expect to see doctors leave entire operations in a robot's digital hands -- yet. The tissue-stitching robot is designed to do one specific tasks, similar to machines in other industries. For example, robot arms do the welding and painting in most U.S. car assembly lines. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) system is equipped with suturing equipment plus smart imaging technologies to let it track moving tissue in 3D and with an equivalent of night vision. Sensors have been added to help guide each stitch and tell how tightly to pull. All the surgeons have to do is place fluorescent markers on the tissue that needs stitching, and the robot takes aim. Human studies should begin within the next few years. The STAR system is just one of many up and coming robots to put surgery into the hands of non-surgeons.
I thought that sewing machines had been doing this ever since they were invented!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
A friend of mine had a child with a Cesarean. She was sewed up by two people afterwards — an experienced doctor on one side and a young "resident" on the other.
The resident's side remained painful for two weeks longer than the experienced doctor's side. If a robot can do these things in the near future, it would be welcome progress indeed. We are very short on doctors.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Dateline 2030
750K student loan from med school and no jobs. And all the mc jobs in 50 miles of me don't want some with a masters much less an MD.
What to do?
Why in the world are engineers wasting money on developing these "automobiles"? They are slower than horses and can't carry as much weight as locomotives. It seems like the 19th century man can no longer be bothered to spend the time to properly saddle up a horse. What a waste of time and effort.
I haven't read that book, but it will be impressive when these battlefield robots will be able to rush out to the site of an explosion, gather up all the people parts, sort them by DNA, sew them back together and restart the heart before the brain runs out of oxygen.
They should also put a couple of these on each airline flight, and build them out of the same stuff as the black boxes.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.