Robot Performs Heart Surgery, Will Surgeons' Union Go On Strike?
from the scalpel-please dept
Score one for medical technology. The first heart surgery performed solely by a robot took place in Italy this week, while doctors in the US monitored its progress. The robot already had experience from 10,000 human-guided surgeries, data from which it can now reference on its own. In this way, the machine is like an advanced chess computer, onto which trainers can load millions of games for it to reference in game situations. Though doctors are among the biggest costs in healthcare, and technology like this could certainly help save money, we can expect surgeons to fight tooth and nail from letting robots encroach on their territory. They'll claim, much like top chess players do, that surgery is part art and that a robot could never match the performance of a human. Of course, robots don't get tired after a long day, stressed out, lose concentration, or have any of the other human traits that affect the quality of surgery. And while doctors make mistakes all the time, robots will be held to a higher standard; after one mistake, there will be calls to curtail their use in medicine. With all due respect, many surgeons are like plumbers who work on an extremely complicated system of pumps and valves -- in both cases, technology is reducing the value of their labor.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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30-year-old technology
Surgeons already use plenty of semi-automated tools for their daily work. It is usually the patients themselves who want to be operated on by a human surgeon.
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Re: 30-year-old technology
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Re: Re: 30-year-old technology
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bleeding heart
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Re: bleeding heart
Talk about "the blue screen of death." D:
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Re: Re: bleeding heart
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what i'd be affraid of is one mistake happening and the robot not catching it.. i.e a tip of a blade falling off or something..
do i care if doctors are laid off for robots? absolutely not.. im not a doctor and i didnt spend 14 years at yale but oh well. doctors are good tho.. they diagnose well most of the time
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Like driverless subway drivers ...
Don't expect anyone to be rational about this.
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Re: Like driverless subway drivers ...
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Cool, but give me my human...
As an immediate benefit I could see these machines being used in areas where access to surgical staff is limited (and malpractice laws aren't as well enforced). Sad but true I see the early adopters of this technology being third world hospice and clinics, not industrialized patient care centers where patient preference for the foreseeable future will remain in the hands of a doctor.
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Re: Cool, but give me my human...
With an almost infinite repository for information (via internet, other robots, specialists around the world), it seems that a robot would find it much easier to answer the question "so what do I do now?" than a human, who can only draw on past experience (only what is remembered) and the experience of anybody else in the room.
What does worry me is some sort of hardware or software failure. In many cases these cannot be forseen, but in the case of medical equipment, there is no doubt they will be tested extensively. With new advances in programming language verification (the most recent Scientific American has a good article), it is becoming possible to "prove" good software, much like you can "prove" hardware. Any unforseen faults can be taken care of by a secondary, or even tertiary watchdog system.
Personally, I would trust a robot (not now, but in the future) better than a doctor who may have had one too many drinks at lunch, whos wife/husband may have left him/her last night, or who is having some other sort of emotional problem.
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Let the Doctors feel the pain!
Don't ya love technology.
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Re: Let the Doctors feel the pain!
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This is strange
Where/when was the robot training done?
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In the future the poor will get the buggy robot surgeons and only the rich will have access to human doctors (paraphrasing what somebody else once said about computers in education).
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Robot Golf
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Cool!
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People's worries are mostly unfounded here
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Heart Surgery
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What about the people?
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