Eshan Maitra
21st century is full of surprises. The level of advancement in the field of science in close decades surpassed the progress of thousands of years. It is obvious that we can believe the medical procedures, even surgeries will be done by robots someday. But none expected this to be true so soon. A robot literally outperformed human surgeon in a practical environment. The day is not very far when robots will be performing all of the medical surgeries.
Robot-assisted surgery existed for years. Only because the robots usually did not have such high functionality of decision making and complex algorithm back then. But STAR has Near-Infrared Fluorescent (NIRF) system that let it sense a patient’stissue conditions in three dimensional view. It can easily the detect changes in force and makes adjustments in real time as tissue moves.”Until now, autonomous robot surgery has been limited to applications with rigid anatomy, such as bone cutting, because they are more predictable,” said one of the team, Axel Krieger. “By using novel tissue tracking and applied force measurement, coupled with suture automation software, our robotic system can detect arbitrary tissue motions in real time and automatically adjust.”
The surgery was done on pig specimens and it was the biggest success in history. The quality of suturing was much higher than a human surgeon. After all, it is programmed to do the perfect job and there is scope of mistake on that. Though STAR took about 4 times longer than a human surgeon. One of the researchers, Ryan Decker mentioned about that to Melissa Healy at the Los Angeles Times, “We can run the robot really, really fast. But in this study, we really focused on… the outcomes, so we didn’t run it as fast as we could.”
Their final results on the ‘Science Translational Medicine’ suggests that they will be commercially teaming up with hospitals and made sure STAR will performing such tissue surgeries within two years.