Robots Are Learning How to Perform Surgery by ‘Watching’ Videos

As the US population ages, it’s going to need more surgeries—but those rolled into operating rooms across the country might find themselves face-to-face with a robot rather than a human surgeon in the not-so-distant future.

Unfortunately, the United States is suffering from a surgeon shortage. According to a report by the American Association of Medical Colleges, the country is going to be short 10,000 to 20,000 surgeons by 2036.

Maybe if medical school wasn’t so expensive, all those people with steady enough hands and sharp enough minds to be surgeons would be able to afford an education. Instead, we’re training surgical robots to be better at their jobs. They’re like us learning how to make brownies on YouTube, just with a person’s life on the line.

Robotic surgery has been helping flesh and blood surgeons for years, but the new training is working to take it up a notch. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University recently joined forces to help surgical robots teach themselves new tasks needed to become more efficient surgeons. The tasks range from all-important surgical steps like suturing and tying knots to small tasks like picking up a dropped tool.

Researchers used videos of robots performing surgical tasks on practice suture pads to build out the language of the training model. Each frame in the video consists of pixels, which can be converted into numerical data. The model then translates these numbers into another set of data corresponding to specific robot actions.

If this all sounds like something out of a dystopian nightmare, don’t worry. Your tonsillectomy won’t be performed by a robot surgeon tomorrow. There are still many hurdles to overcome before you’re getting surgically repaired by a robot like we’re living in Star Wars.

The machines still have to learn how to think on the fly and respond appropriately in emergencies, like repairing improperly placed sutures or stopping unforeseen bleeding. Privacy is also a problem here, as the robots need to be trained on real surgical footage, which means finding real patients who consent to video of their surgery being used to train robots.

There’s also a whole range of moral and ethical questions that have yet to enter the chat. Hopefully, we’ll get around to those before we toss a robot surgeon in a hospital to slice and dice a kid whose appendix is about to pop.