Robots could start performing surgeries on humans within 10 years

Automated surgery on humans could be possible within the next 10 years, say researchers who have used a robot equipped with the necessary tools and artificial intelligence to successfully perform surgeries on pigs, The Guardian reports.

Robot surgeons trained on video footage of doctors have performed gallbladder removal surgeries on pigs without human assistance. In total, eight surgeries were performed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, with 100% success rate. During these surgeries, the robots were equipped with tools to cut, clamp and grasp soft tissue.

During the tests, the robots took just over five minutes to complete the 17-step operation. The robots severed the gallbladder from its connection to the liver, applied six clips in a specific order, and removed the organ. The robots mostly corrected course without human intervention six times during each operation.

"We were able to perform a surgical procedure with a really high level of autonomy," said Axel Krieger, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. "In prior work, we were able to do some surgical tasks like suturing. What we’ve done here is really a full procedure. We have done this on eight gallbladders, where the robot was able to perform precisely the clipping and cutting step of gallbladder removal without any human intervention. So I think it’s a really big landmark study that such a difficult soft tissue surgery is possible to do autonomously."

As a result of these trials, the researchers say that similar surgeries could be performed on humans within the next decade. Robots equipped with artificial intelligence can mimic the skills of the most skilled and best surgeons in the world. The technology used in the trials is based on the same type of neural networks that underlie popular chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The researchers also noted that the robots performed operations slightly slower than humans, but they were also less jerky and took shorter paths between tasks. The robots were also able to correct errors during execution, request different tools, and adapt to anatomical variations.

Almost 70,000 surgeries are now performed each year using robots that follow human instructions. Only a few procedures, such as cutting bones in the hip and knee, are performed semi-autonomously. The UK's health minister, Wes Streeting, said that increasing the number of robotic surgical procedures was the cornerstone of a 10-year plan to reform the National Health Service (NHS).

According to NHS figures, within the next ten years, nine out of ten surgeries will be performed using robots. Currently, robots are involved in one in five operations.

John McGrath, the UK's leading expert on robotic surgery, who chairs the NHS Robotics Steering Committee, says autonomous surgery is still a few years away, but it could one day lead to a human being controlling multiple operations at once, reducing waiting times for procedures and performing operations with greater precision than humans and less damage to surrounding body structures.

At the same time, McGrath says that autonomous surgery is still far from clinical application, because successful tests on dead pig organs cannot accurately test the robots' ability to respond to movement, breathing, blood, accidental trauma, smoke or other factors that appear during procedures on living people.