🦾 Robot learns surgery as well as surgeons by watching videos

• A surgical robot trained by watching videos of experienced surgeons performed the same surgical procedures with the same precision as human doctors.
• The robot learned three fundamental surgical tasks: needle manipulation, lifting of body tissue, and suturing.
• Researchers used hundreds of videos from da Vinci robots to train the system, eliminating the need to program each individual movement manually.

Robot surgery advances with video learning

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a system where surgical robots can learn directly from video recordings of experienced surgeons. The robot, a da Vinci Surgical System, could after training perform surgical procedures with the same precision as human doctors.

The research team used a learning model based on the same architecture as ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, which works with text, this model translates surgical movements into mathematical calculations that the robot can understand.

The system was trained with hundreds of videos from wrist cameras placed on da Vinci robots during surgical procedures. There are nearly 7,000 da Vinci robots in use worldwide, and over 50,000 surgeons are trained on the system, creating a large archive of training data.

Fast learning of new procedures

The new method makes it possible to train a robot for new surgical procedures in just a few days, compared to previous methods that could take years to develop. The robot also proved capable of handling unexpected situations, such as automatically picking up a dropped needle and continuing the procedure.

Ji Woong Kim, postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins, explains that the model works well even with a limited number of demonstrations and can adapt to new environments it hasn't encountered before.

The research team is now working on training robots to perform complete surgical procedures, not just individual tasks. The method could be used to quickly teach robots different types of surgical procedures.

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