Robots doing Surgery

Does the idea of a robot cutting into your eye with a knife make you shudder? Robots have a big advantage over humans. Their hands don't shake!

Surgery used to involve the surgeon holding the knife. They could feel the flesh as it was cut into. That is important so they don't cut too deeply. Now many operations are done using 'keyhole surgery'. Rather than opening you up, only a small cut is made. The scalpel is on the end of a long wire and it's pushed through the cut. A tiny camera is pushed through too so the surgeon can see what they are doing. Trouble is the surgeon can't feel what is happening any more, and any shake of their hand is made worse by the long tools.

Are you dead?

Point your finger at arm's length. Try to keep your finger tip completely still. If you can then your are either a trained marksman or your heart isn't beating!

A surgeon has to control that shake. A robot doesn't, so with keyhole surgery it can be better to use a robot. At the moment the robots don't decide what to do (in the future they might). They just copy the actions of the surgeon minus the shake. For that to work, though the surgeon still needs to be able to feel what the robot's knife is doing.

Using all your senses

We mainly get information from computers looking at screens using our sense of sight. There is no reason why we can't use our other senses too. With robot surgery, the surgeon has to feel as well as see what the robot is doing. That is what happens. The surgeon can still feel their knife pushing through the flesh. They can feel when it touches bone. It's all just simulated though. They are holding a robot controller not the real knife.

It takes lots of computer science to do it. The robot has to work out what it is cutting through. Then using virtual versions of flesh and bone, it has to simulate what it feels like back in the instruments and they have to resist in just the right way. It does work though and it's making surgery safer.

When humans and robots work as a team they can do things better. Working together just feels like the right thing to do!