Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Robot Outperforms a Surgeon in a Precision Training Task

Your next surgeon maybe a robot! And how about fully automated surgeries? 😄

"... In a paper published 10 May in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, a multinational team of researchers reported the results of a study where a robot was able to complete a common surgery training task with the same accuracy as an experienced surgeon, while completing the task more quickly and consistently. ..."

From the abstract:
"Peg transfer is a well-known surgical training task in the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS). While human surgeons teleoperate robots such as the da Vinci to perform this task with high speed and accuracy, it is challenging to automate. This paper presents a novel system and control method using a da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) surgical robot and a Zivid depth sensor, and a human subjects study comparing performance on three variants of the peg-transfer task: unilateral, bilateral without handovers, and bilateral with handovers. The system combines 3D printing, depth sensing, and deep learning for calibration with a new analytic inverse kinematics model and time-minimized motion controller. In a controlled study of 3384 peg transfer trials performed by the system, an expert surgical resident, and 9 volunteers, results suggest that the system achieves accuracy on par with the experienced surgical resident and is significantly faster and more consistent than the surgical resident and volunteers. The system also exhibits the highest consistency and lowest collision rate. To our knowledge, this is the first autonomous system to achieve ``superhuman'' performance on a standardized surgical task. ..."

Robot Outperforms a Surgeon in a Precision Training Task - IEEE Spectrum The feat brings us one step closer to fully automated surgeries

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