Shanghai Lectures

As we wrote about it before, ShanghAI Lectures was organized this year again, featuring various topics within the realm of embedded intelligence and robotics. Within the last session, I was invited to give a short overview of "Human Skills for Robots--Transferring Human Knowledge and Capabilities to Robotic Task Execution in Surgery." You can listen to the talk here, or just read the summary below.

"Almost 90 years ago, the idea of telesurgery was born, along with the initial concept of robots. From the early 1970s, researchers were focusing on robotic telepresence, to empower surgeons to treat patients at a distance. The first systems appeared over 20 years ago, and robotic surgery has quickly become a standard-of-care for certain procedures—at least in the USA. Over the decades, the control concept remained the same; a human surgeon guiding the robotic tools based on real-time sensory feedback. However, from the beginning of the development, the more exciting (and sometimes frightening) questions have been linked to machine learning, AI and automated surgery. In the true sense of automation, there have only been unclear reports of one single robotically planned and executed surgery so far, despite the fact that many research groups are working on the problem. This talk introduces the major efforts currently undertaken in centers of excellence around the globe to transfer the incredibly diverse and versatile human cognition into the domain of surgical robotics."

You can learn more about the prime example of a research project focusing on understanding surgical skills from the Johns Hopkins Univeristy's Language of Surgery.