Robotic tube for surgery autonomously navigates inside a beating heart

A robotic surgical device has learned to autonomously navigate inside a beating heart. Using only a small camera for vision, it successfully travelled to the correct location in the hearts of pigs for surgeons to then complete the operation. Pierre Dupont at Harvard Medical School in Boston and his colleagues created a robotic catheter --a thin tube widely used in surgeries to deliver devices or drugs. The device has a camera and LED light on its tip and is connected to a motor system that controls its movement from the other end. The team used 2000 images of the interior of a heart to train an algorithm to control the movement of the catheter.