'This gull got very lucky!' The young lesser black backed gull was found in Cape Cod with a bobber hanging out of its mouth. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A young seagull found in Cape Cod bit off a bit more than he could chew. The veterinary team at the New England Wildlife Center recently removed a large fishing hook from the bird's GI tract.

Laparoscopic surgery constrains instrument motion around a fixed pivot point at the incision into a patient to minimize tissue trauma. Surgical robots achieve this through either hardware to software-based remote center of motion (RCM) constraints. However, accurate RCM alignment is difficult due to manual trocar placement, patient motion, and tissue deformation. Misalignment between the robot's RCM point and the patient incision site can cause unsafe forces at the incision site. This paper presents a sensorless force estimation-based framework for dynamically assessing and optimizing RCM misalignment in robotic surgery. Our experiments demonstrate that misalignment exceeding 20 mm can generate large enough forces to potentially damage tissue, emphasizing the need for precise RCM positioning. For misalignment $D\geq $ 20 mm, our optimization algorithm estimates the RCM offset with an absolute error within 5 mm. Accurate RCM misalignment estimation is a step toward automated RCM misalignment compensation, enhancing safety and reducing tissue damage in robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery.

Autonomous robotic systems hold potential for improving renal tumor resection accuracy and patient outcomes. We present a fluorescence-guided robotic system capable of planning and executing incision paths around exophytic renal tumors with a clinically relevant resection margin. Leveraging point cloud observations, the system handles irregular tumor shapes and distinguishes healthy from tumorous tissue based on near-infrared imaging, akin to indocyanine green staining in partial nephrectomy. Tissue-mimicking phantoms are crucial for the development of autonomous robotic surgical systems for interventions where acquiring ex-vivo animal tissue is infeasible, such as cancer of the kidney and renal pelvis. To this end, we propose novel hydrogel-based kidney phantoms with exophytic tumors that mimic the physical and visual behavior of tissue, and are compatible with electrosurgical instruments, a common limitation of silicone-based phantoms. In contrast to previous hydrogel phantoms, we mix the material with near-infrared dye to enable fluorescence-guided tumor segmentation. Autonomous real-world robotic experiments validate our system and phantoms, achieving an average margin accuracy of 1.44 mm in a completion time of 69 sec.

Robotic-assisted surgical systems have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing surgical precision and minimizing human errors. However, existing systems lack the ability to accommodate the unique preferences and requirements of individual surgeons. Additionally, they primarily focus on general surgeries (e.g., laparoscopy) and are not suitable for highly precise microsurgeries, such as ophthalmic procedures. Thus, we propose a simulation-based image-guided approach for surgeon-centered autonomous agents that can adapt to the individual surgeon's skill level and preferred surgical techniques during ophthalmic cataract surgery. Our approach utilizes a simulated environment to train reinforcement and imitation learning agents guided by image data to perform all tasks of the incision phase of cataract surgery. By integrating the surgeon's actions and preferences into the training process with the surgeon-in-the-loop, our approach enables the robot to implicitly learn and adapt to the individual surgeon's unique approach through demonstrations. This results in a more intuitive and personalized surgical experience for the surgeon. Simultaneously, it ensures consistent performance for the autonomous robotic apprentice. We define and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach using our proposed metrics; and highlight the trade-off between a generic agent and a surgeon-centered adapted agent. Moreover, our approach has the potential to extend to other ophthalmic surgical procedures, opening the door to a new generation of surgeon-in-the-loop autonomous surgical robots. We provide an open-source simulation framework for future development and reproducibility.

This study is a technical supplement to "AI gone astray: How subtle shifts in patient data send popular algorithms reeling, undermining patient safety." from STAT News, which investigates the effect of time drift on clinically deployed machine learning models. We use MIMIC-IV, a publicly available dataset, to train models that replicate commercial approaches by Dascena and Epic to predict the onset of sepsis, a deadly and yet treatable condition. We observe some of these models degrade overtime; most notably an RNN built on Epic features degrades from a 0.729 AUC to a 0.525 AUC over a decade, leading us to investigate technical and clinical drift as root causes of this performance drop.

While robotic laparoscopic surgical systems do make certain procedures safer and less invasive, those systems are still operated by human surgeons. Now, however, a surgical robot has performed a delicate operation entirely on its own. Known as the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), the robotic-arm-equipped device was designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Back in 2016, when operating on pigs, STAR was shown to be equal to or better than experienced surgeons at performing a procedure known as an intestinal anastomosis – this involved painstakingly suturing together the two severed ends of a small intestine. At the time, however, the robot had to access the intestine via a large external incision, and still required some guidance from humans.

For more than 30 years, robotics has employed in the healthcare business. These robots range from laboratory robots that deal with medications to surgical robots that do surgeries or procedures on their own to robots that care for patients after surgery. Robots can help humans stay healthy for a long time without the use of medication or hospitalisation. Intel, for example, provides new technologies for the creation of health robots such as surgical robots, modular robots, service robots, mobile robots, and autonomous robots, allowing it to expand its reach in a variety of health-related fields. AI-driven robotic surgery is a mechanical device that allows doctors to focus on the difficult components of surgery by assisting with surgical tool handling and positioning during procedures. Their usage reduces surgeons' instabilities during surgery and assists them in improving their abilities and performing better during interventions, resulting in improved patient outcomes and lower overall healthcare costs.

As technology advances, more and more industries are able to benefit from it. Among those industries is health care, particularly the surgery department. As a branch of medicine that's highly dependent on a surgical team's skills and experience, surgery also relies heavily on innovations and new technologies that can help improve efficiency and safety. Suppose you're part of the team that performs surgical operations. In that case, it's worth knowing some of the latest trends and innovations that can make your work more efficient, more promising, and somewhat less tedious than it currently is.

Following the successful use of online apps, tracking devices and telemedicine to control a pandemic, while enabling remote care, doctors in the Middle East have started using medtech gadgets for non-invasive as well as accurate procedures. Robots have been pitched as cops, office assistants and guides for the future, but the need for contactless healthcare has led to their adoption as support staff in hospitals, to monitor patients in quarantine. Robotic pharmacies have also become a feature at AI-backed facilities in the UAE, while droids have even conducted operations, one of which involved removal of a tumour. Considering the precision that smart machines bring to the table, robo-arms are now being used for removal and transfer of kidneys from donors to patients, at a hospital in Dubai. The surgeries that benefited two people were carried out using the state-of-the-art Da Vinci tool, which is a pair of robotic arms, that can imitate the movement of human hands.

The new design allows surgeons to perform more common surgical procedures based on the arrangement of the overhead arm's flexibility and precision allowing better access to more body parts that previously were not an option. The robotic surgeries are minimally invasive and help patients with quicker recovery time. "The incisions are tiny – about a ½ inch, the size of a dime. The size of the incisions, along with the precise movements of the surgeon, result in less blood loss and less trauma to the surgical site," said Riverside officials in a statement released. "Using a console to control the robotic arms that hold the surgical tools, surgeons can bend and turn the instruments of the da Vinci Xi Surgical System in more ways than human hands."