Researchers Create Autonomous Surgical Robotic Device To Navigate Inside The Heart Of Pigs

Borrowing from way cockroaches skitter along walls, scientists have created a robotic device that safely guides itself through delicate chambers of a pig’s heart as it’s beating. 

It is one of first times researchers have shown that a truly autonomous surgical robot can navigate inside heart, not controlled by a doctor with a joystick, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Science Robotics . 

Heart surgeons routinely push a thin tube called a cater through twisting and turning blood vessels to make repairs in heart without open surgery. But how does a robotic version find its own way through moving heart tissue and with blood swishing in way? 

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital turned cater’s camera tip into essentially an “optical whisker,” said cardiac bioengineering chief Pierre Dupont, le researcher. Just as cockroaches navigate along walls and rats reach out with ir whiskers, cater maps its path through heart, tapping periodically against heart’s valve and wall ever so lightly — with about force of a stick of butter sitting in your hand, Dupont said. technology combines camera’s images with machine learning to interpret what tissue it’s touching and how hard. 

“This robot is trying to walk along wall of heart until it gets to valve,” Dr. Uma Duvvuri of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who hes a robotic innovation lab but wasn’t part of Wednesday’s study. “That’s a pretty exciting development but this is still very, very preliminary.” 

demonstration technology is still years away from any operating room, and isn’t designed to replace a surgeon, Dupont said. Inste, he said it might free up a surgeon’s time to focus on harder tasks, comparing it to a plane’s autopilot — and also reduce time patients and medical staff are exposed to X-rays that currently are needed for navigation. 

“ easiest part of autonomy in surgery is technology,” Dupont said. “ hardest parts are politics, regulatory” approval and legal efforts. 

Dupont’s team tested robotic cater in 83 procedures in live pigs in a lab. device found its target, on average taking seconds longer than a doctor threing a cater into place. But Dupont said robotic cater will learn, just like humans, and get better and faster with more practice. 

Russ Taylor, a medical robotics specialist at Johns Hopkins University, called technology clever and study “a significant achievement, but I wouldn’t flag it as a breakthrough.” 

Robots with different levels of autonomy have been used in surgery for riation rapy and orthopedics, said Taylor, who wasn’t part of research. And Pittsburgh’s Duvvuri pointed to studies with a robot that can stitch tissues toger without human help. 

Still, true autonomy, “in my humble opinion, it’s still a hammer looking for a nail,” said Duvvuri, who couldn’t think of an area where it would improve a procedure. 

And while new study focused on a potential heart use, Duvvuri said ding that sensing technology to caters could have or uses, such as helping to diagnose risky growths in colon. 

ded Hopkins’ Taylor, “I see things evolving where machine keeps undertaking more and more discrete tasks while working in partnership with humans.” 

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