/ News
Robot Performs Soft-Tissue Surgery By Itself
With a bulky camera eye and spindly hydraulic arm, this medical robot looks like it could fit in on an automotive production line. This bot isn't building a Toyota, though. It carefully scans soft, sticky intestinal tissue and delicately weaves stitches with unmatched surgical precision. Indeed, with no guiding hand from its fellow doctors, it is the best in the world at performing the medical operation it was designed for. It is performing surgery all by itself.
The surgical bot is named STAR, or Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, and it just performed the world's first autonomous, soft-tissue surgery. STAR is the creation of a team of computer scientists and medical researchers led by Peter Kim, a biochemist at the Children's National Health System in Washington D.C. The machine performed several supervised (but unguided) surgical procedures in which it sutured together two severed segments of bowel intestine in living, anesthetized pigs.
The operation is called intestinal anastomosis, which is used after a bowel segment needs to be removed. Not only did the pigs survive the successful operations, but STAR was found to have far outperformed manual open surgery, larposcopy surgery, and the next best robotic assistedsurgery. The robot's surgical finesse is overviewed today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
"Current robotic surgery is 'teleoperated', [meaning that] every step and every movement of the robot, is directed by the surgeon," says Axel Krieger, a robotics expert with the team at Children's National Health System. "Our innovation is really to make this more autonomous, so that you don't have to direct every motion."
To oversimplify this operation, you can think of intestinal anastomosis like sewing together two sticky tubes. A human surgeon—performing open surgery with just a needle in hand—is almost three times as fast as STAR. But by almost all other measures the robot outperformed its organic counterparts. STAR excelled in the consistent spacing of its sutures, creating taught, leak-proof joints and avoiding mistakes when removing its needle from the tissue. Whether they performed open, laproscopic, or even robot-assisted surgery, the humans couldn't match the machine.
"The outcomes were surprising to us—that consistency throughout the performance was better than [human] surgeons," says Kim.
To be fair, humans still played assistant to STAR during the surgeries, performing tasks like making sure the suture thread didn't get tangled as it was pulled tight. But STAR followed its own operation algorithm, picking where and when to poke its needle. And the researchers aren't too worried about the speed issue, either. "We can run the robot really, really fast. But in this study, we really focused on the outcomes, so we didn't run it as fast as we could," says Krieger.
STAR owes its skill to more than just to its nimble suturing tool—which is articulated with 7 degrees of freedom—and the mechanical precision of its programming. The heart of STAR's performance is an interesting breakthrough in robotic imaging technology. The robot's mechanical eye takes images in near-infrared fluorescent light, "similar to a night vision technology that military uses", says Kim. This guides the robot through a confusing, shifting mire of gelatinous soft tissue, which can sometimes look indiscernible to the human eye.
STAR then combines those images with a 3D tracking algorithm "which informs the robot where things are in a three-dimensional space," Kim says. "By combining these two, we are able to follow [the] soft tissue movement... with a precision that we need to carry out a surgical task."
Kim sees STAR as proof that a whole range of soft tissue surgeries could soon be handed over to autonomous robots, which (sorry, med students) would likely perform them far better than doctors. For example, other soft tissue surgeries include tumor removals and tendon repairs. "Fundamentally what we've shown here is that soft tissue surgery can be done autonomously. I expect that at some point this could be available to anybody and everybody," says Kim.
Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a20718/first-autonomous-soft-tissue-surgery/
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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