Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

Summary

When the system was ready, Kim’s team put it through a training phase that looked a bit like mentoring a novice human doctor. Imitation learning The procedure Kim chose for the robot to master was cholecystectomy, a surgical gallbladder removal routinely performed in US hospitals (roughly 700,000 times a year). “The objective is to remove the tubes connecting the gallbladder to other organs without causing the internal fluids to flow out,” Kim explained. To make that happen, a surgeon has to place three clips on the cystic duct (the first tube), cut it, and then clip and cut the cystic artery (the second tube) in a similar way. Kim’s team broke this procedure down into 17 steps, sourced lots of porcine gallbladder and liver samples from pig cadavers to experiment on, and had a trained research assistant operate a DaVinci robot, performing the procedure over and over again to build the training data set for the robot. Algorithms that would power the SRT-H were trained on over 17 hours of video captured from the DaVinci endoscope and cameras installed on its robotic arms. This video feed was complemented by the kinematics data—the exact motions made by the robotic arms—and natural language annotations. Based on this data, Kim’s robot learned to perform a cholecystectomy with 100 percent success rate when operating on samples it has not been trained on. It could also accept human feedback in natural language—simple tips like “move your arm a bit to the left” or “put the clip a bit higher.” These are the sorts of hints a mentoring surgeon would give to a student and, in a similar way, SRT-H could learn from them over time. “You can take any kind of surgery, not just this one, train the robot in the same way, and it will be able to perform that surgery,” Kim says. SRT-H was also robust to differences in anatomy between samples, other tissue getting in the way, and imperfect imagery. It could even recover from all the tiny mistakes it was making during the training proces...