“The physical demands of surgery aren’t talked about much,” says Kumar.
I just bumped into one of my patients being discharged three to four days after an operation using the robot, instead of the three to four weeks it would have taken in the past.”īut it isn’t just about high precision. “But it is such an immersive experience that I’ve been able to carry out more operations, more quickly and successfully than I could have dreamed of. “The natural instinct of a surgeon is to be hands on the patients, so sitting at a console staring at a screen controlling a robot does take some getting used to,” says Pardeep Kumar, consultant urological surgeon at the Royal Marsden, London, who regularly operates using the da Vinci robot. Robots in the home offer further support, keeping patients eating, moving and medicating.įor surgeons, who are often backing the development of these robots, the benefits of a machine like the da Vinci system are manifold. Now the promise of medical robotics lies in facilitating operations that are quicker and more accurate, meaning shorter hospital stays, greater patient turnover, lower chances of patients catching hospital superbugs and an overall saving of money. Initially, the vision behind the da Vinci robot was that a surgeon in London could operate in safety on a sick child in Liberia or a wounded soldier in Afghanistan, but financial, technological and communication worries have, for the present, put paid to such dreams. However, I do see a role in the future for more autonomous robots giving surgeons a helping hand as an assistant during operation.” Now that’s OK in a structured environment, but the operating theatre is just a mess to a computer and it will be very hard for it to make sensible decisions. “For a computer to do something intelligent, it has to be able to see what’s happening. “I don’t see any application for artificial intelligence during surgery at the moment,” says Belpaeme.
Where the researchers are taking their cue from the seriously sexy technology of driverless cars is, for example, in the development of domestic robots for palliative care, be it helping you make a cup of tea or alerting the doctor if you skip your medication. Their lack of automation is down to the technological challenges of giving a robot the skill and judgment of a surgeon, as well as the lurking fear of legal action and even just the desirable reassurance of having an expert on hand for those awful “what-ifs”. Not that a lack of automation is anything to be sniffy about these machines still use powerful computers to carry out difficult jobs. “They are instruments for the surgeons to use for keyhole surgery, as they offer greater precision than handheld tools, particularly in hard-to-access parts of the body such as close to the spinal cord, and recovery is then so much faster because the operation is so precise.” “It’s not that the robots do any of the surgery themselves,” says Tony Belpaeme, professor of cognitive systems and robotics at Plymouth University. It might conjure up an image of Star Wars’ C-3PO in scrubs, but many of these medical machines are actually closer to the robots used to build your car.