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Dread going the doctor? It could be worse. Your next physician could have the bedside manner of a robot. In fact, your next physician could be a robot.
Scared yet?
Surgeons and medical engineers have been trying to create machines that can assist in surgery, increase a surgeon’s dexterity and support hospital staff. These aren’t humanoid robots but computer controlled systems that have been optimized for use in sensitive situations. An exhibition called Sci-fi Surgery: Medical Robots, opening this week at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, shows a range of robots used in medicine.
“Industrial robots appeared in factories in the early 1960s and robots have become an important part of space exploration,” says Sarah Pearson, curator of the exhibition. “But robots have been comparatively slow to be used in medicine because surgeons haven’t felt comfortable with them.”
Robots in medicine aren’t intended to replace surgeons, says Pearson, but act as companion devices. Most robots used in medicine aren’t autonomous because surgeons haven’t been comfortable giving up control, but with advances with technology, we can expect more autonomous machines.
The exhibition offers a peek into some of the most interesting surgical robots out there, from one of the earliest medical robots to a prototype camera pill.
Above: PROBOT
In 1988, Brian Davies, a medical robotics professor at the Imperial College in London, designed a robot (with help of colleagues) that could remove soft tissue from a person. It was one of the first robots to do so. What’s more, it could perform the task with a fair degree of autonomy.
Most industrial robots usually have an arm, complete with a shoulder, elbow and wrist mechanism, and a gripper tool for the hand. That’s overkill for surgical purposes, and because of the room needed to move a robot arm around, it might even be dangerous for use in very small spaces inside human bodies. That’s why Davies and his team designed a small robot that has three axes of movement, plus a fourth axis to move a cutter for prostate surgery. (See a simplified drawing of the robot’s structure.)
The geometry of this design allows the robot to hollow out a cavity from within the prostate gland. The robot is controlled by a pair of programmable embedded motor control systems. The system are directed using a i486DX2-based PC. The robot allows surgeons to specify the correct cutting sequence to remove tissue.
But the idea of having any degree of independent behavior in a robot didn’t catch on. Although its designers tested the PROBOT in the lab and in human subjects, it was never used widely in surgery.
“Doctors just didn’t feel comfortable with the idea,” says Justin Vale, a consultant neurological surgeon at Imperial College and a fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons. “The PROBOT project shut down when funding for it ran out.”
Caption: PROBOT/ Imperial College London
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