TECH NEWS – Artificial intelligence has successfully carried out surgery in an experiment by following surgeons’ vocal instructions.

Medical technology is showing science fiction–level progress. A surgical robot recently achieved a major milestone in both soft and hard skills. A robot was able to successfully operate on a pig’s gallbladder by responding to vocal commands.

“This work marks a major leap compared to previous efforts, as it addresses some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in real-world settings,” said the study’s lead author, Ji Woong “Brian” Kim. Before the surgery, the robot was trained on videos of the procedure. Then the actual gallbladder removal was performed by the robot, following the lead surgeon’s verbal instructions. It was even able to respond in real time to emergency scenarios and changes as they occurred. The entire process is very similar to how human surgeons would learn the procedure, which means these robots could potentially be trained using the same methods and understanding used for medical students. This could make training robots much more feasible for hospitals that might not have the technical resources.

“That’s what makes this so inhumanly difficult, because how do you describe it? How do you write this in code? Can I watch a human learn what I’m supposed to do? If the answer is yes, then things, if not trivial, become significantly easier,” Dr. Mathias Unberath, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently told IFLScience.

This type of learning is called imitation learning, and it’s something people do all the time. When robots do this, it’s often a mix of machine learning and data input, but here it seems to have focused on video and vocal training. In this study, the robots were able to perform gallbladder removal with 100% accuracy after watching the training materials.

Even more promising is the idea of autonomous surgical robots that can be easily trained via natural language while responding to unexpected changes. This could allow far more people to access the healthcare they need, with many more robots helping deliver care where it’s most needed.

Source: PCGamer, IFLScience