A robot trained on videos of surgeries performed a lengthy phase of a gallbladder removal without human help. The robot operated for the first time on a lifelike patient, and during the operation, responded to and learned from voice commands from the team—like a novice surgeon working with a mentor.
The robot performed unflappably across trials and with the expertise of a skilled human surgeon, even during unexpected scenarios typical in real life medical emergencies.
I want that thing where a light “paints” over wounds and they heal.
Hold on 3P0…you gotta little piece of human stuff stuck on your right end effector clamp top hinge pin. There, all good! Continue!
Naturally as this kind of thing moves into use on actual people it will be used on the wealthiest and most connected among us in equal measure to us lowly plebs right…right?
Are you kidding!? It’ll be rolled out to poor people first! (gotta iron out the last of the bugs somehow)
You really don’t understand modern medical bullshit. The rich will be all over this, just like AI, Just like NFTs just like every bullshit thing that comes up they get roped into by a flashy salesman
Oh yeah, I’ve been successfully propagandized into thinking rich people became rich through merit, I forgot how many of them are complete morons XD
Thanks for reminding me
you could not pay me enough to have my surgery done by a robot
They obviously don’t feel comfortable with the robot doing surgery on humans just yet either which is why they’re not actually suggesting doing that yet. It will have to go through years and years of certification before that’s even considered.
I’m sure most surgeries will still be conducted by humans but there are situations where one of these would be extremely helpful. Any situation where a surgeon isn’t currently accessible and can’t quickly get there. Remote communities, Disaster relief, Arctic research facilities, Starships trapped in the Delta quadrant, War zones, Ships at sea.
Do you think a 5 bed hospital will have the money to afford a robotic surgeon?
yeah, it’s much better to have a towel left inside of you by a real human.
If it were the only option, I’d gladly take it.
I rely on robots to do a lot of other things in my life, directly and indirectly.
Well, not many directly. But machines, definitely.
I trust a good machine much more than any human.
Have you considered that the machine is made by a collection of humans?
Yes. But if the machine has proven to work reliably it will usually do so for its lifetime, while humans are prone to e multitude of errors. Especially in the medical field.
Oh good it’s voice controlled. Because that technology works amazingly all the time.
SurgeonGPT?
And then you‘re lying on the table. Unfortunately, your case is a little different than the standard surgery. Good luck.
What if I’m on the table telling the truth?
That’s a different thing indeed. In your case the AI 🤖 goes wild, will strip dance and tell poor jokes (while flirting with the ventilation machine)
realistic surgery
lifelike patient
I wonder how doctors could compare this simulation to a real surgery. I’m willing to bet it’s “realistic and lifelike” in the way a 4D movie is.
Biological creatures don’t follow perfect patterns you have all sorts of unexpected things happen. I was just reading an article about someone whose entire organs are mirrored from the average person.
Nothing about humans is “standard”.
Right I’m sure a bunch of arm chair docs on lemme are totally more knowledgeable and have more understanding of all this and their needed procedures than actual licensed doctors.
More than the doctors? No, absolutely not.
More than the bean counters who want to replace these doctors with unsupervised robots? I’m a lot more confident on that one.
I wonder how doctors could compare this simulation to a real surgery. I’m willing to bet it’s “realistic and lifelike” in the way a 4D movie is.
I think “lifelike” in this context means a dead human. The robot was originally trained on pigs.
At some point in a not very distant future, you will probably be better off with the robot/AI. As it will have wider knowledge of how to handle fringe cases than a human surgeon.
We are not there yet, but maybe in 10 years or maybe 20?The main issue with any computer is that they can’t adapt to new situations. We can infer and work through new problems. The more variables the more “new” problems. The problem with biology is there isn’t really any hard set rules, there are almost always exceptions. The amount of functional memory and computing power is ridiculous for a computer. Driving works mostly because there are straightforward rules.
I’d bet on at least twenty years before it’s in general use, since this is a radical change and it makes sense to be cautious about new technology in medicine. Initial clinical trials for some common, simple surgeries within ten years, though.
This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value. It isn’t the same as feeding an LLM the unfiltered Internet and then expecting it to learn only from the non-crazy parts.
it’ll definitely get the greenlight in countries like China before anywhere in the west, I believe
Why?
Just a hunch, since technological advancements seem to hit the public realm much faster in places like China, in the cities especially. I don’t know what the laws are like there, but I’ve heard rumors that there is less government regulations for technologies that can benefit the general public, like drones and automated metros. Oh yeah, and how could I forget about the robots they show off at conventions, to take the place of receptionists and other customer-facing positions.
There’s always a Japanese company showing off mechs at those conventions as well. We never see them in general usage though.
This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value.
Hopefully more people learn that this is the important part.
It becomes nonsense when you just feed it everything and the kitchen sink. A well trained model works.
Or the most common cases can be automated while the more nuanced surgeries will take the actual doctors.
Fringe cases yes, like rare conditions. It almost certainly won’t be able to handle something completely unexpected.
The AI will (probably) be familiar with every possible issue that no human will be able to match.
I’m not sure what kind of “completely unexpected” situation is possible can happen, that a normal surgeon would handle better?
But I agree it would have to be a lot smarter than current LLM and self driving for instance. Like a whole other level of smarter. But I think that is where we are heading.I think you make a mistake of thinking that our collective body of knowledge is exhaustive. We discover new things all the time. Until we know everything (i.e. never), there will be gaps that AI will not be able to accommodate.
Would it be able to handle a sudden power outage? A fire alarm going off?
What happens to an ecmo machine during a power outage or fire alarm?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation
The idea should be to augment healthcare professionals with tools they can use. The hospital will need to have contingencies in place. I agree if that your point is that we can’t replace people with machines. But we can increase effectiveness with them.
As well as a human, and without fucking up because of stress.
Also my guess is these would be monitored by trained professionals.
I doubt it. It simply would be enough, if the AI could understand and say when it reaches its limits and hand over to a human. But that is even hard for humans as Dunning & Kruger discovered.
and since its been the way its been for awhile sugeons know more theoretically how to do surgery rather than practically so can’t really take over.
I assume my insides are pretty much like everyone else’s. I feel like if there was that much of a complication it would have been pretty obvious before the procedure started.
“Hey this guy had two heads, I’m sure the AI will work it out.”
How does the success rate compare
See the part that I dont like is that this is a learning algorithm trained on videos of surgeries.
That’s such a fucking stupid idea. Thats literally so much worse than letting surgeons use robot arms to do surgeries as your primary source of data and making fine tuned adjustments based on visual data in addition to other electromagnetic readings
That’s such a fucking stupid idea.
Care to elaborate why?
From my point of view I don’t see a problem with that. Or let’s say: the potential risks highly depend on the specific setup.
Imagine if the Tesla autopilot without lidar that crashed into things and drove on the sidewalk was actually a scalpel navigating your spleen.
Absolutely stupid example because that kind of assumes medical professionals have the same standard as Elon Musk.
Elon Musk literally owns a medical equipment company that puts chips in peoples brains, nothing is sacred unless we protect it.
Into volunteers it’s not standard practise to randomly put a chip in your head.
Being trained on videos means it has no ability to adapt, improvise, or use knowledge during the surgery.
Edit: However, in the context of this particular robot, it does seem that additional input was given and other training was added in order for it to expand beyond what it was taught through the videos. As the study noted, the surgeries were performed with 100% accuracy. So in this case, I personally don’t have any problems.
I actually don’t think that’s the problem, the problem is that the AI only factors for visible surface level information.
AI don’t have object permanence, once something is out of sight it does not exist.
If you read how they programmed this robot, it seems that it can anticipate things like that. Also keep in mind that this is only designed to do one type of surgery.
I’m cautiously optimist.
I’d still expect human supervision, though.
Yeah but the training set of videos is probably infinitely larger, and the thing about AI is that if the training set is too small they don’t really work at all. Once you get above a certain data set size they start to become competent.
After all I assume the people doing this research have already considered that. I doubt they’re reading your comment right now and slapping their foreheads and going damn this random guy on the internet is right, he’s so much more intelligent than us scientists.
Theres no evidence they will ever reach quality output with infinite data, either. In that case, quality matters.
No we don’t know. We are not AI researchers after all. Nonetheless I’m more inclined to defer to experts then you. No offence, (I mean there is some offence, because this is a stupid conversation) but you have no qualifications.
So… Judging by recent trends in AI, this will be used to devalue the labor of surgeons and be provided as the only option available to people who are not rich. People will die from what would get a human charged with neglegent homicide but, it will be covered up and, when it comes to light just how dangerous it is, nothing will happen because all of the regulatory agencies have been dismantled.
I would rather get surgery done by a robot than not get it done at all. I’m not gonna be picky about “devaluing surgeons” if my life is on the line, but if that’s the hill you wanna die on then good on ya, mate.
Who’s dying on what hill now?
Outside of the US there are pretty stringent rules about what can and cannot be used in the medical profession. Typically it will take at least a decade for a drug to be approved, which is actually a problem in and of itself, but you’re not concerned about that, you’re concerned about technology being used before it’s ready.
As for “devaluing the work of surgeons”, surgeons are overworked as it is, there is nowhere near enough of them. If they don’t have to do simple procedures then they are available to do the more complex surgeries that actually require skill. They’ll be fine. Wealth isn’t really a factor in countries where healthcare isn’t profit motivated.
OR maybe everyone — including the poor — will eventually have access to robotic surgeons with the equivalent of like 500 human years of experience, but with the latest surgical best practices that have only existed in recent years. The experience gained by a single surgery could be shared across all of them.
We’re talking about surgery. If some technology can provide significantly more valuable labor than its human counterpart (which, in this case, could mean more lives saved), then it might actually be worth exploring.
That would be wonderful. The current way that the world has been “working” for a good while now makes me think it unlikely, unfortunately. The vast majority of technological innovation in the last half-century has been used to extract wealth and replace options available to the non-ultra-wealthy with inferior substitutes that are cheaper to make, often for the same effective cost.
Not fair. A robot can watch videos and perform surgery but when I do it I’m called a “monster” and “quack”.
But seriously, this robot surgeon still needs a surgeon to chaperone so what’s being gained or saved? It’s just surgery with extra steps. This has the same execution as RoboTaxis (which also have a human onboard for emergencies) and those things are rightly being called a nightmare. What separates this from that?
It can’t sneeze
Human flaw. A surgeon doesnt require steady hands. So if they were in any way damaged they could still continue being a surgeon.
so theoretically they could make sex bots and train them on… so they perform ‘unflappably’!
If we go by that logic, some worker from your supermarket should be able to do surgeries
Doctors have to learns this much so they can handle most really unusual stuff, not because they have to know this for a standard surgery.
My son’s surgeon told me about the evolution of one particular cardiac procedure. Most of the “good” doctors were laying many stitches in a tight fashion while the “lazy” doctors laid down fewer stitches a bit looser. Turns out that the patients of the “lazy” doctors had a better recovery rate so now that’s the standard procedure.
Sometimes divergent behaviors can actually lead to better behavior. An AI surgeon that is “lazy” probably wouldn’t exist and engineers would probably stamp out that behavior before it even got to the OR.
i mean, you could just as easily say professors and university would stamp those habits out of human doctors, but, as we can see… they don’t.
just because an intelligence was engineered doesn’t mean it’s incapable of divergent behaviors, nor does it mean the ones it displays are of intrinsically lesser quality than those a human in the same scenario might exhibit. i don’t understand this POV you have because it’s the direct opposite of what most people complain about with machine learning tools… first they’re too non-deterministic to such a degree as to be useless, but now they’re so deterministic as to be entirely incapable of diverging their habits?
digressing over how i just kind of disagree with your overall premise (that’s okay that’s allowed on the internet and we can continue not hating each other!), i just kind of find this “contradiction,” if you can even call it that, pretty funny to see pop up out in the wild.
thanks for sharing the anecdote about the cardiac procedure, that’s quite interesting. if it isn’t too personal to ask, would you happen to know the specific procedure implicated here?
That’s just one case of professional laziness in an entire ocean of medical horror stories caused by the same.
Or more likely they weren’t actually being lazy, they knew they needed to leave room for swelling and healing. The surgeons that did tight stitches thought theirs was better because it looked better immediately after the surgery.
Surgeons are actually pretty well known for being arrogant, and claiming anyone who doesn’t do their neat and tight stitching is lazy is completely on brand for people like that.
Eliminating room for error, not to say AI is flawless but that is the goal in most cases, is a good way to never learn anything new. I don’t completely dislike this idea but I’m sure it will be driven towards cutting costs, not saving lives.
