Robots have better surgical capabilities than doctors

Millions of people around the world are undergoing annual surgery. Many of them unfortunately suffered from complications, sometimes because the surgeon made a mistake.

One study aimed to determine the prevalence of such errors, nearly one-third of patients had complications after surgery and half of them stemmed from preventable mistakes. be by the doctor.

Can we program a robot to perform perfect surgeries and eliminate some human errors? Researchers have developed a smart auto robot, called STAR and claims it can do it.

In a new study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers said STAR did better than human surgery specialists when performing an intestinal brake operation in pigs. Robots sewn more uniformly than our doctors do, which means fewer complications.

STAR robot performs surgery under the supervision of doctors.(Photo: Tech Insider).

"This achievement shows a new era of mechanical surgery , which can reduce errors and complications for patients who undergo surgery, from removing tumors to restoring the respiratory tract. " , Megan Frisk, senior editor of Science Translational Medicine magazine, commented.

Experts say more experiments will be needed before robots are ready for mass use, but new research is a promising step.

STAR is considered to possess a number of features that humans do not have and its automatic operation is synonymous, this robot goes far beyond the capabilities of surgical robots under the control of doctors like Da Vinci (robots do not outperform human experts in most cases). STAR uses near-infrared imaging techniques to more closely observe human visual ability, which is particularly useful when operating inside the body, where many things look similar.

Researchers also program STAR to identify which surgical techniques are most effective in different contexts and select them. Human doctors are highly trained, but our brains are not functioning to the same degree as machines.

Although surgical robots can perform this process better than humans, it will not rob their jobs. Researchers supervised STAR in the experiment and they plan to continue this work in the future.

Until now, the team has only tested robots in animal surgeries. Whether STAR is successful in human clinical trial surgeries is currently unknown. But Dr. Peter Kim, a member of the research team, believes the robot may appear in hospitals for another 2-3 years, after other machine tools come into use.