Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this week’s edition…LLMs pave the way for autonomous robotic surgery; Apple Intelligence is released for the iPhone; The U.K. government launches a chatbot; AI workers seek whistleblower protections; and generative AI offers five million reasons to rethink e-waste.
Two of the most fascinating topics I’ve covered in this newsletter are AI’s transformative effects in healthcare and how large language models have reignited progress in robotics. Today’s edition brings these together: I’m talking about AI-powered robotic surgery.
I attended a Johns Hopkins University panel where researchers specialized in this area predicted that, in large part thanks to LLMs, autonomy is poised to become “a ubiquitous part of surgery” in the near or at least mid-term future. Similar to how vehicle autonomy began with automating some capabilities, they said autonomous robots will initially take on select tasks that support human surgeons. They also had no doubt we’ll see surgeries routinely performed fully autonomously by robots in our lifetime.
LLMs change the game
After hitting a wall with its previous approach of trying to pre-program robots to make specific movements, the robotics field has found a way forward with the same approach that’s made LLMs so successful. Axel Krieger, a mechanical engineering researcher focused on the development of surgical systems, spoke on the panel about new research he and his associates would be sharing this week about how the Transformer—the same one that powers tools like ChatGPT, only with robot action as the output—can be used to overcome limitations surrounding how a surgical robotic system called Da Vinci learns tasks via imitation learning. The team demonstrated its findings through the successful execution of three fundamental surgical tasks: tissue manipulation, needle handling, and knot-tying.
Overall, robotic surgery research has followed the trends of AI, moving from a “model-based approach” to a “learning-based approach” that enables surgical robots to learn via demonstrations rather than be designed with specific domain expertise. These models also improve over time with more data and can scale to accomplish different kinds of tasks.
The downside of the learning approach, however, is that it’s more opaque and unpredictable than the model approach. Russell Taylor, another researcher on the panel, argued that the introduction of these capabilities into actual clinical use will have to be gradual, with clear assurances that the robot will not harm the patient. He also argued that robots should only be used if they have a clear advantage, either enabling surgeons to perform tasks better and more safely, or making it possible to do something that wasn’t possible before. If these robots are further proven to be more consistent and precise, it could be a game-changer for safety and better surgery outcomes: human surgeons are human after all, which means they get fatigued and make mistakes.
The future of surgery
Already, surgeries like lasik eye surgery are performed with a high degree of autonomy, but research is starting to show promise for even more complicated surgeries. In another study, Krieger and team found that a Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which is designed for complex soft tissue surgeries, can actually outperform expert surgeons on some key metrics.
“We have fewer of these hesitancy events when we misplace a needle and have to pull it back out, so significantly better in these errors. And also in the spacing (of the sutures)—much more consistent,” he said.
The goal behind AI-powered robotic surgery is two-fold: make surgery less invasive for patients and meet the growing demand. According to data shared during the panel, there is already a shortage of surgeons and the caseload is expected to double as the aging population grows. Robots could augment critical portions of surgery with better precision and increasing autonomy. Each year, 310 million major surgeries are performed. In 2023, about four million were performed with robotic assistance, and this rate is expected to grow by 18% annually.
This doesn’t mean surgeons will be out of work anytime soon, but their role will likely change.
“The more likely scenario is that the surgeon will remain in overall strategic control while delegating specific tasks to the robot while the surgeon supervises,” said Taylor. “As AI algorithms become more powerful, the delegated tasks will become more sophisticated.”
And with that, here’s more AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
