Autonomous surgical robots have the potential to transform surgery and increase access to quality health care. Advances in artificial intelligence have produced robots mimicking human demonstrations. This application might be feasible for surgical robots but is associated with obstacles in creating robots that emulate surgeon demonstrations.
References
Association of American Medical Colleges & IHS Markit. The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections from 2019 to 2034 (Association of American Medical Colleges, 2021).
Meara, J. G. et al. Global surgery 2030: evidence and solutions for achieving health, welfare, and economic development. Lancet 386, 569–624 (2015).
Liu, J. H., Etzioni, D. A., O’Connell, J. B., Maggard, M. A. & Ko, C. Y. The increasing workload of general surgery. Arch. Surg. 139, 423–428 (2004).
Saeidi, H. et al. Autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis. Sci. Robot. 7, eabj2908 (2022).
Brohan, A. et al. RT-2: vision-language-action models transfer web knowledge to robotic control. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2307.15818 (2023).
Ibrahim, H. et al. Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses. Sci. Rep. 13, 12187 (2023).
Vaswani, A. et al. Attention is all you need. in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (NeurIPS, 2017).
Vuong, Q. et al. Open x-embodiment: Robotic learning datasets and RT-x models. Conference on Robot Learning, Towards Generalist Robots: Learning Paradigms for Scalable Skill Acquisition Workshop https://openreview.net/forum?id=zraBtFgxT0 (2023).
Acknowledgements
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for Comp/IS/Eng-Robotics under Grant No. DGE 2139757 and NSF/FRR 2144348.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schmidgall, S., Kim, J.W. & Krieger, A. Robots learning to imitate surgeons — challenges and possibilities. Nat Rev Urol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41585-024-00873-z
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41585-024-00873-z
- Springer Nature Limited