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Medicine Robotics The Almighty Buck

Beyond Safety: Is Robotic Surgery Sustainable? 54

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-my-co-pay? dept.
Hallie Siegel writes: The release last week of the study on adverse events in robotic surgery led to much discussion on the safety and effectiveness of robotic surgical procedures. MIT Sloane's Matt Beane argues that while the hope is that this dialogue will mean safer and more effective robotic procedures in the future, the intense focus on safety and effectiveness has compromised training opportunities for new robotic surgeons, who require many hours of 'live' surgical practice time to develop their skills. Beane says that robotic surgery will likely continue to expand in proportion to other methods, given that it allows fewer surgeons to perform surgery with less trauma to the patient, but no matter how safe we make robotic surgical procedures, they will become a luxury available to a very few if we fail to address the sustainability of the practice.
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Beyond Safety: Is Robotic Surgery Sustainable? More

Beyond Safety: Is Robotic Surgery Sustainable?

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  • We can't just keep digging up fossil robotic surgeons, that will only last another hundred years. It's time we started developing renewable robots.

    • Yes, we may have of reached Peak Surgeons. Clearly they weren't talking about the doctors. What they meant was that the raw materials to create sustainable robots, should be hand gathered by indigenous peoples, using only organic ores from mines found in nature.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      I'll crank up my SUH (Sports Utility Hospital) for you. It does eight robotic surgeons per patient.

      • I'll crank up my SUH (Sports Utility Hospital) for you. It does eight robotic surgeons per patient.

        I here the SHUH (Sport Hybrid Utility Hospital) can do 12 now using regenerative technology...

  • Possible solution. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jklovanc ( 1603149 ) on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @07:42PM (#50210957)

    The issue seems to be that while conventional surgery requires help from students robotic surgery does not. It becomes very difficult for a student to do part of the surgery and thereby learn by doing. A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods. The main one being that there is already a separation from the patient by the machine. Every image and feedback that the doctor gets through the robotic surgery device can be simulated by software. It can be programmed to simulate problems so the doctor has to deal with more realistic issues. In effect a flight simulator for surgery.

  • Only if situated in the state's only "self-sustaining scallop farm". Now say that five times fast...
  • Unprecedented and problematic!

    • Do what the military does... Just convert all this to acronyms, mostly with 3 letters... Trust me, you will feel better in no time, just nobody will know for sure what you are talking about.

  • How will we know the robotic surgeons have installed the most recent security updates? Will they be WiFi enabled so the teenager sitting in the hospital cafeteria can use them to play Operation and try to light up my nose while trying to take out my funny bone?

  • the real question is when will we advance this technology far enough to not just be an assistive device for surgeons to actually being the surgeons?

    • The procedural parts of medicine are among the most automatably difficult tasks imaginable - people do not have standard sizes or shapes, they do not always have the particular problem that you wish they had, and improvisation is the name of the game. The Turing Test is many orders of magnitude easier than even the simplest surgical operation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Honestly, I'd beg to differ. When you cut a human body open you're likely to find a relatively standard set of organs. Even with all conditions and permutations it is a whole less open-ended than say driving a car, where arguably a lot of odd conditions could happen at any time. In short, there's a few vital functions that that the body must uphold and if a robot surgeon does he's not making anything worse. He might not cure everything, but that's not the point.

        • Humans are squishy and flexible. Computers are not good with this - the only way to even simulate soft-body physics is sheer computational brute force. It's nightmarishly complicated just trying to predict which shame a blob of liver is going to assume if you poke it in a certain place.

        • Beg away. I'm an anesthesiologist, I watch surgeons work five days a week. What do you do?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Now you'll have to worry about the surgeon's wifi access point
    with cleartext passwords that are never changed from the default. :(

    The malware will be called Hack and Slash (for obvious reasons).

  • Nothing to do with sustainability, nothing to do with robotic surgeons: worst summary ever. Not that I blame the submitter for this, it's the article which says "robot" when it really means remote controlled instrument, and "sustainability" when it's really talking about inadequate training. This is ridiculous though. I had this brief vision of robotic surgeons operating via some machine learning algorithm and... sustainability something... I hadn't worked out how sustainability factored into it before my i

  • Well, maybe it's not yet ready for regular use, but in the end when the robots have been refined, it will be the ONLY way one still wants a surgery.. It's not like regular surgeon doesn't make mistakes, it sadly happens too often, but that no wonder, they are only human too..

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