Humanoid robots controlled by surgeons did world-first operation on live pigs - Ars Technica

Overview

Humanoid robots controlled by surgeons did world-first operation on live pigs

Preclinical trial is testing the feasibility of humanoid robots in surgery.

Details

Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment—but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots’ movements in a new example of human-robot teamups.

The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders from live pigs during a preclinical trial that was published in the journal Nature. If this approach eventually proves clinically ready for human patients, surgeons could use such humanoid robots to remotely perform robotic-assisted surgical care in smaller hospitals and clinics that lack the resources to install specialized but expensive surgical robots.

“It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” said Shanglei Liu, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in an interview with UC San Diego Today. “So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas, to the battlefield, and even to space.”

The experiment used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot made by leading Chinese robotics company Unitree. The cheapest baseline G1 model with effectively non-functional hands has a starting price of

But such humanoid robots made in China are still significantly cheaper than specialized surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, which can cost anywhere between half a million dollars and several million dollars.

The specialized surgical robots can also weigh about 1,800 pounds and take up considerably more space in operating rooms. By comparison, the Unitree humanoid robots, standing at 5-feet tall and weighing just 60 pounds, may be more suitable for smaller clinical settings in remote areas.

Of course, Intuitive’s da Vinci system has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration and other medical regulatory agencies and has been tested in multiple clinical trials for various surgical operations. The humanoid robots teleoperated by surgeons are still very much in the experimental phase, even if they have successfully performed surgeries on live animals in this preclinical study.

The UC San Diego researchers had to build physical adapters to allow the humanoid robots, nicknamed “Surgie,” to hold surgical tools. They also created software to allow intuitive human hand motions to translate smoothly into controlling the surgical tools attached to the robots’ wrists.

A surgeon operating a control console with a PC provided a stereo headset display for surgeons to see what they were doing, along with a foot pedal to engage or disengage surgeon hand movements from the surgical tools’ movements. The first surgery on a live pig included a human surgeon standing alongside the humanoid robot as an assistant, while the second operation featured two teleoperated robots working together.

But the experiment also revealed current limitations in using humanoid robots for teleoperated surgery. The team had to pause for several minutes at a time during the surgery to recalibrate the robots for accuracy or to physically move the robot body or arm into the proper position relative to the medical instruments. That meant the surgery took “much longer than when performed with existing specialized surgical systems,” according to UC San Diego Today.

The compact body of the Unitree G1 robot with an arm span of just 450 millimeters—compared to a range of 1.6 to 1.8 meters for an adult human—also constrained the reach for remote operators. Other constraints in the robots’ range of motion combined with the need for frequent recalibration during operations to increase the cognitive and operational workloads for the surgical team, which is not ideal.

Any delay between the human operator’s controlling hand motions and the robot’s follow-on motions could also be important for future clinical scenarios involving remote-controlled surgeries. Current teleoperated humanoid robot systems usually have latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds, whereas previous studies suggest surgical robots should ideally have a latency below 150 milliseconds, the researchers wrote in their paper.

Both new surgery residents and experienced surgeons also generally performed faster on practice tasks when using the controls of da Vinci Research Kit hardware—a standard for telerobotic surgery—compared to controlling the humanoid robots.

Still, the research team is continuing to improve the teleoperated humanoid robot system while exploring future options. Michael Yip, a professor of electrical and computing engineering at the University of California San Diego, described the goal of creating an “autonomous surgical assistant” that could work alongside human surgeons while doing general tasks, like fetching tools or even cleaning up operating rooms.

“Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access,” Yip told UC San Diego Today. “This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”

However, many leading robotics researchers agree that general-purpose robots capable of doing their work autonomously without human intervention are still a long way off—especially if they are supposed to function safely around humans. Ars previously interviewed several robotics researchers about the state of AI-powered autonomous robots and why autonomy is still limited in surgical robots.

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Key Takeaways

• Humanoid robots controlled by surgeons did world-first operation on live pigs

• Preclinical trial is testing the feasibility of humanoid robots in surgery

• Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment—but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors

• The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders from live pigs during a preclinical trial that was published in the journal Nature

• “It’s a fraction of the cost and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” said Shanglei Liu, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in an interview with UC San Diego Today