Robot Performs Heart Surgery, Will Surgeons' Union Go On Strike?

from the scalpel-please dept

Mon, May 22nd 2006 2:32pm — Joseph Weisenthal

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.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

22 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

dorpus, 22 May 2006 @ 2:39pm

30-year-old technology
These sorts of feats have been performed experimentally since the 1970s. Robots will still make mistakes, and who will be liable then? From the hospital's point of view, a surgical machine, with its expensive up-front and maintenance costs, may not offer significant savings over human labor. The patient still has to be anesthetized by an anesthesiologist, and other labor still has to be present on site in the event of complications.

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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
dorpus, 22 May 2006 @ 2:44pm

Re: 30-year-old technology
p.s. human anatomy is very diverse -- all of us have very different shapes of arteries running through our system. Can software really be smart enough to match an experienced surgeon's intuition? How many computer programmers have 20 years of experience in human anatomy? Surgical machines will go through constant upgrades, the vendor will refuse to support machines over a few years old, and who can afford buying a $1 million machine every year?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
yossi, 22 May 2006 @ 3:00pm

_bleeding_ edge. lol
[ link to this | view in thread ]
mongoose5150, 22 May 2006 @ 3:22pm

bleeding heart
"Sorry for the inconvenience. Windows has shut down your system to prevent a serious error. Please restart into safe mode for trouble shooting purpses"
[ link to this | view in thread ]
stephen, 22 May 2006 @ 3:30pm

actually yes a robot can find arteries.. they inject stuff into your veins before surgery that makes them visible.. durrrrr
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
[ link to this | view in thread ]
MissingFrame, 22 May 2006 @ 3:38pm

Like driverless subway drivers ...
Soon you'll have doctors that are "operating" the equipment which basically means they're monitoring it while reading a newspaper.

Don't expect anyone to be rational about this.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Tyshaun, 22 May 2006 @ 3:40pm

Cool, but give me my human...
As a software developer with 10 years of embedded programming experience (in the medical equipment field so yes I do know a lot of anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry along with programming and mechanics), I would say this is truly a very cool thing, but I still would prefer a highly trained human over a robot any day of the week. Sure, machines can become more proficient with experience, and statistically will have better outcomes than human doctors, but for now their limitation will be their inability to deal with situations they havent experienced or weren't programmed to deal with, and I would hate to be the guy on the table when HAL turns around and goes "More Data Needed". Seems to me that most prudent institutions using this technology would have a surgical team observing the procedures anyway, which negates the strongest case for thise machine, taking the very expensive surgeon out of the loop.

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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
m0rd3r, 22 May 2006 @ 3:52pm

Re: bleeding heart
"Sorry for the inconvenience. Windows has shut down your system to prevent a serious error. Please restart into safe mode for trouble shooting purpses"

Talk about "the blue screen of death." D:
[ link to this | view in thread ]
meowmix70, 22 May 2006 @ 4:10pm

Re: Re: bleeding heart
Truly "cutting" edge. Bwaha!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 22 May 2006 @ 4:35pm

Let the Doctors feel the pain!
I think this will become the future just as other things have occurred within this Era. The truly interesting thing I find is this: The doctors can now join the ranks of the jobless with the rest of us. We'll just outsource the technicians to other countries to perform any maintenance and monitoring over a network. Plus, there is no reason why a computer can not perform a diagnosis and dispense medication.

Don't ya love technology.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Searcher169, 22 May 2006 @ 4:51pm

Re: Re: 30-year-old technology
Just couple this tech with sonic imaging and there's your answer to the variations from person to person. LOL Humans can't see inside you while machines can. They can deal with much more info amd make sense of it. they do it all the time for us now.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
dorpus, 22 May 2006 @ 5:05pm

Re: Let the Doctors feel the pain!
Be careful what you wish for, friend. Would you want to go into surgery, with nurses assuring you that if things go wrong, they will call the 1-800 support number in India?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Joshua, 22 May 2006 @ 5:47pm

I think robots would be fine for "run of the mill" stuff but would prefer to have a specialized human behind the knife for seriously intricate and rare surgeries.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
bromley, 22 May 2006 @ 5:59pm

This is strange
I don't recall reading about robot surgery being perfected on animal first, which is standard in medicine.
Where/when was the robot training done?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Dietrich Adler, 22 May 2006 @ 6:47pm

Re: Like driverless subway drivers ...
http://www.intouch-health.com/ith/index.html
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Kevin, 22 May 2006 @ 8:23pm

"Robots will be held to a higher standard" -- on what do you base your confidence? You're assuming the errors will get reported and not swept under the carpet for the sake of efficiency.

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).
[ link to this | view in thread ]
william thomas, 22 May 2006 @ 11:17pm

Robot Golf
This would give Dr.'s more time to devote to their golf games....unless they have robots do that also. Wonder what the robot's handicap would be?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Louis, 23 May 2006 @ 2:49am

Cool!
I wish Isaac Asimov was still alive to see this.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Jtheletter, 23 May 2006 @ 5:40am

People's worries are mostly unfounded here
As a developer of robots myself - currently military, previously pharmeceutical - I must say that the high standards of performance that these machines are held to is much more than anyone probably expects. The pharmecuetical robots I worked on were to be audited by the FDA and literally every minute step in the development and testing process is documented and reviewed constantly. While true, these surgical robots may not be perfect currently, with time their accuracy and scope of knowledge will only increase, and eventually they will surpass human surgeons for a majority of cases. I think a lot of us are confused by medical dramas we see on TV, such as House - which I enjoy - which tend to show us the rare cases where seemingly routine cases suddenly take an unexpected and complicated turn and only the supersmart doctors can figure it out. But that's fiction, it's done for drama's sake. 99.9% of surgeries are very straightforward, and after this robot has performed/learned say 100,000 surgeries it will be very capable of handling just about anything. As to how they tested/taught this system I'm sure it was a combination of guided input and surgeons controlling the robot (telepresence) while the robot recorded what was being done. Essentially the Dr held the robot's hand through the surgery and taught it what it should be doing. Will these robots totally eliminate all surgeons? No, you will always have someone on hand. But now instead of a team of 6 medical professionals you may only need 2 or 3, which will reduce costs. Also, there are strict guidelines for medical equipment that prevent the constant upgrade churn and weekly bugfixes that you see in the consumer PC market, so no, they won't be spending an extra million every other week to perform critical upgrades to the system constantly. It would be similar to how an MRI is serviced in the hospital.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 23 May 2006 @ 7:00am

Re: Cool, but give me my human...
And what about the human surgeon who turns around and says "More data needed"? Robot or human doesn't matter if the situation is outside of any of its experiences.

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.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Heart Surgery, 18 Jun 2009 @ 10:37am

Heart Surgery
Even though robots have steadier hands than doctors, I trust a human to perform heart surgery.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Jeffrey, 24 Jun 2009 @ 4:56am

What about the people?
There are already many people trying to finish out their school and make it into a successful career as a nurse. Also there are others trying to make it in the world as successful surgeons or doctors. IF we put a robot in a doctor's position and have the robot doing what the doctor would be doing THEN all the robot has done is wasted the person's life in college. People are saying that the people would then just work on these robots, but what happens when 10 people finish university and have their doctor's diploma in their hands and they are told that only 2 are needed to work with the robots? Are we not then just bringing upon ourselves the difficulty of more unemployment? Will there be a day when robots completely take the position of the doctor? What happens to all those Doctors that spent 14 YEARS in college spending all that money just for it to go to waste, because they are told to learn how to maintain the robots and must attend another 4 years in college? I'm not planning on ever being a doctor but I've had 500,000 spent on me to save my life. I'll tell you this, I am glad it was a surgeon. Possibly in 10 plus years, when there is zero percent of robot errors maybe but not now. Why don't we fix our economies first? We have more than we can handle on our plates as it is, but adding the unemployment due to the robots just makes more difficulty. We need to be able to learn to fix our first problems before adding more. We can't procrastinate the problems of our countries just to make another possible problem. These along with much more in depth possibilities run my mind, and I'll tell you it isn't necessary. Let's do something right and fix these problems.
[ link to this | view in thread ]