Good news! Autonomous surgical systems are coming to a hospital near you.
"... Researchers at Johns Hopkins University trained a robot on videos of operations, and then had it conduct a gallbladder removal on its own – with no mechanical help, just voice commands, like a theater team assisting the lead surgeon. Named SRT-H (Surgical Robot Transformer-Hierarchy), the robot absorbed its training and converted it to practice, with the ability to extract the gallbladder time and time again, and adjusting in real-time when needed. ..."
"... Hierarchical surgical robot transformer, SRT-H, truly performs surgery, adapting to individual anatomical features in real-time, making decisions on the fly, and self-correcting when things don't go as expected. ...
SRT-H learned how to do the gallbladder work by watching videos of Johns Hopkins surgeons doing it on pig cadavers. The team reinforced the visual training with captions describing the tasks. After watching the videos, the robot performed the surgery with 100% accuracy. ..."
From the abstract:
"Research on autonomous surgery has largely focused on simple task automation in controlled environments. However, real-world surgical applications demand dexterous manipulation over extended durations and robust generalization to the inherent variability of human tissue. These challenges remain difficult to address using existing logic-based or conventional end-to-end learning strategies.
To address this gap, we propose a hierarchical framework for performing dexterous, long-horizon surgical steps. Our approach uses a high-level policy for task planning and a low-level policy for generating low-level trajectories. The high-level planner plans in language space, generating task-level or corrective instructions that guide the robot through the long-horizon steps and help recover from errors made by the low-level policy.
We validated our framework through ex vivo experiments on cholecystectomy, a commonly practiced minimally invasive procedure, and conducted ablation studies to evaluate key components of the system.
Our method achieves a 100% success rate across eight different ex vivo gallbladders, operating fully autonomously without human intervention. The hierarchical approach improved the policy’s ability to recover from suboptimal states that are inevitable in the highly dynamic environment of realistic surgical applications. This work demonstrates step-level autonomy in a surgical procedure, marking a milestone toward clinical deployment of autonomous surgical systems."
Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help (original news release) "System trained on videos of surgeries performs like an expert surgeon"
SRT-H: A hierarchical framework for autonomous surgery via language-conditioned imitation learning (no public access)
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