Surgeons and scientists from Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric
Surgical Innovation at Children's National Health System are the first
to demonstrate that supervised, autonomous robotic soft tissue surgery
on a live subject (in vivo) in an
open surgical setting is feasible and outperforms standard clinical techniques in a dynamic clinical environment.
The study, published today in Science Translational Medicine,
reports the results of soft tissue surgeries conducted on both
inanimate porcine tissue and living pigs using proprietary robotic
surgical technology, Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), developed at
Children's National. This technology removes the surgeon's hands from
the procedure, instead utilizing the surgeon as supervisor, with soft
tissue suturing autonomously planned and performed by the STAR robotic
system.
Soft tissues are the tissues that connect, support or surround other
structures and organs of the body such as tendons, ligaments, fascia,
skin, fibrous tissues, fat, synovial membranes, muscles, nerves and
blood vessels. Currently more than 44.5 million soft tissue surgeries
are performed in the U.S. each year.
"Our results demonstrate the potential for autonomous robots to improve
the efficacy, consistency, functional outcome and accessibility of
surgical techniques," said Dr. Peter C. Kim, Vice President and
Associate Surgeon-in-Chief, Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric
Surgical Innovation. "The intent of this demonstration is not to replace
surgeons, but to expand human capacity and capability through enhanced
vision, dexterity and complementary machine intelligence for improved
surgical outcomes."
While robot-assisted surgery (RAS) has increased in adoption in
healthcare settings, the execution of soft tissue surgery has remained
entirely manual, largely because the unpredictable, elastic and plastic
changes in soft tissues that occur during surgery, requiring the surgeon
to make constant adjustments.
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