Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Surgery without (human) surgeons?

Next generation surgical robots: Where's the doctor?

I heard that the military is working on autonomous battlefield medics that could initiate treatment without direct instruction from a human operator. The linked story describes a pretty amazing autonomous surgical robot.

"Feasibility studies conducted by Duke University bioengineers have demonstrated that a robot -- without any human assistance -- can locate a man-made, or phantom, lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session. The researchers believe that as the technology is further developed, autonomous robots could some day perform many more simple surgical tasks."

No comments:

Post a Comment