Friday, April 6, 2018

Robots Augment Surgeons

For the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) I wrote an article about the use of surgical robots not just to augment the human surgeon, but also as a tool to train surgeons in a better way. 

"Robots can learn from human surgeons, not to replace them, but to help make surgeons better at what they do."

"See one, do one, teach one." That is how the pioneering American surgeon William Halsted described the art of surgery back in 1889. Almost 130 years later, these six words still describe the essence of how surgeons develop their operating skills, says Gregory Hager, Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Hager, who specializes in computer vision and robotics, works with a team of researchers to develop technologies that can fundamentally change the way the surgeon of tomorrow can be trained: not solely in a qualitative way, but making use of quantitative performance measurements recorded by robots that, at the same time, can augment the capabilities of surgeons. Hager made time in his busy schedule to speak with writer Bennie Mols.

Read the rest of this article on the website of the ACM.