Fully robotic surgery may be a couple of decades away. But one thing could speed it up: billionaire engineer Elon Musk’s very public mission to Mars.
Early this year a fully autonomous robot completed a complex soft tissue surgery for the very first time at Johns Hopkins University. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, “excelled at suturing two ends of intestine—one of the most intricate and delicate tasks in abdominal surgery,” Johns Hopkins reported.
That said, there is a big caveat. The patient was a pig, not a human.
More specifically, it was pig tissue … so not even live.
Nevertheless, the feat is “a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans,” Johns Hopkins says. And it brings up the question: when will we have fully automated, fully autonomous robotic surgery for humans?
Robots already help with multiple types of medical operations, including pelvic surgery, spinal surgeries, eye operations including subretinal injections, which — not shockingly — require extreme precision. They all, however, are designed to work with medical professionals and doctors, who are discovering that there are going to be new credentialing requirements for robot-assisted surgeries.
But fully autonomous?
That’s still science fiction.
On Mars, we’d likely need robotic surgeons as well as human doctors.
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Which is kind of appropriate, because so — at this point — is a crewed mission to Mars that will see real live humans step on a planet other than Earth for the first time ever.
“I think it’ll take a couple of decades, at least,” Dr. Tamir Wolf, CEO of the surgical intelligence platform Theator, told me on the TechFirst podcast. “I think it also depends on the space race, because where a lot of this might be valuable are like trips to Mars, for example, where you can’t bring a specialist for each and every procedure, and you want someone or, in this case, something that has tremendous data in the back of their proverbial mind to be able to do things.”
That makes sense.
And we’ve seen scenarios like overwintering in Antarctica, perhaps the nearest thing to a mission to Mars we currently know, drive the future of medicine. From Russian explorer and doctor Leonid Rogozov performing an emergency appendectomy on himself in 1961 to emergency mid-winter rescues, there’s a long history of dicy medical procedures at the South Pole.
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But it’s not just on a mission to Mars that robotic surgery would help.
Not only is robotic surgery potentially more precise, faster, and less prone to human error, it could open up treatment for people who have no good — or affordable — options today.
“Whether we like it or not, there’s this notion of ‘where you live determines if you live,’ just because surgeons are different,” Dr. Wolf says.
He learned that through painful personal experience, diagnosing both his wife and his boss with appendicitis in New York City within the span of just a few months. His wife was treated at one hospital: 12 hours in and out. His boss, despite coming in with a known clinical diagnosis from a doctor, encountered errors and complications at a hospital just seven miles away and had a near-death experience.
And that’s in New York City.
Imagine the lack of medical options in the hinterlands of a remote rural community in Idaho or Nevada, or any other state. Or, with someone who doesn’t have medical insurance in any part of the United States … never mind countries with extremely limited medical systems and very few doctors.
“If you’re at a higher socioeconomic status you go to the specialist, and if you’re lower socioeconomic status then you go to the doctors that have less experience, in the same healthcare system,” says Wolf. “And so that is the type of thing that even in the United States … we’re tackling, and I think there’s tremendous promise in a platform like these surgical robot platforms that we’re working towards.”
In other words, effective medical robots could make health care and surgery not just better, and not just faster, but also more affordable, and in addition, more widely available.
That’s a dream that’ll save lives. And that’s a dream worth fighting for.
But to get there, we’ll need a lot more research and development.
Tamir Wolf, CEO of surgical intelligence platform Theator
Tamir Wolf
A mission to Mars is likely to take 260 days just to get to the red planet. And that’s when Mars and Earth are in optimal orbital alignment, the infamous Hoeman Transfer Orbit of the Matt Damon movie The Martian. Add more time for inopportune alignments, plus time on-planet, plus return time, and the concept of coming home for medical attention seems laughable at best.
That means astronauts will need to take with them everything needed for life and health, including medical care.
And unless they’re tucking a full midsized hospital in the bowels of a SpaceX Starship, that likely means robotic assistance. (Now would be a good time for Tesla to launch its AI-driven humanoid robot, by the way.)
And that’s what we haven’t yet developed.
“If you take a look at the evolution of robotic surgery and compare it to what’s happening like in the automotive industry, for example, you have various steps from no automation at all, to robotic assistance, to partial automations like ADAS,” Wolf says. “And then after that, there [is] conditional automation where the vehicle starts understanding its environment. And then there’s the high automation aspects where that’s really the decision-making process, and ultimately, full automation. I think where we are today … is around the partial automation aspect. We have the capability … this is the initial proof of concept of the capability to automate tasks.”
Unfortunately, because there’s generally a human surgeon fiddling around with a joystick and looking at a screen, what we have today largely isn’t robotic — at least in the autonomous sense — and frankly isn’t that intelligent, Wolf says.
Still, the Johns Hopkins pig tissue experiment with STAR is progress.
“I think we’re moving in the right direction and this is a huge leap, but it’s still a small step when we’re looking at the broad scheme of things.”
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