Updates on Verb Surgical
MIT Technology Review and Mass Device covered the recent announcements of Verb Surgical.
"When executives from Verb Surgical, a secretive joint venture between Alphabet and Johnson & Johnson, presented at the robotics industry conference RoboBusiness late last month, they made the da Vinci sound lame.
Intuitive’s machine, with an average selling price of $1.54 million,
is too expensive and bulky, they grumbled. Pablo Garcia Kilroy, Verb’s
vice president of research and technology, complained that while da
Vinci is an impressive tool, it’s a dumb one that hasn’t widely
transformed surgery. He said that while it enables surgeons to perform
very delicate movements, it doesn’t assist with the cognitive skills
that set the best surgeons apart.
Verb claims to be developing a
product that will make robotic surgery much more powerful and widely
used than the da Vinci has. Garcia didn’t describe that product, and the
company has said that a working prototype to be completed this year
won’t be publicly unveiled. But Garcia laid out the key features Verb
thinks a next-generation robotic surgeon needs. Patents that list him as
a co-inventor offer further clues.
One of Verb’s priorities is to
use artificial intelligence to help surgeons interpret what they see
inside a patient. Existing robots just leave surgeons to look at a video
feed. Garcia said that artificial neural networks like those Google
uses for image search could annotate a feed with anatomical data and
guidance such as information about the boundaries of a tumor. That could
give any surgeon a level of expertise usually obtainable only after
experience with thousands of cases.
Verb has said its robot will
be significantly cheaper than a da Vinci. Garcia said that he also wants
to make it much smaller, and that connecting surgical robots over the
Internet would make it possible to quickly improve their skills and the
guidance they can offer surgeons.
Google researchers recently got
robotics software to learn complex skills more quickly by having
multiple robot arms share their experiences (see “Google Builds a Robotic Hive-Mind Kindergarten”). “We see a similar dynamic happening in surgery,” said Garcia.
Verb’s
robotics technology has been in development for almost four years,
though the company only incorporated in August 2015. The joint venture
was created by combining a project from Verily, previously known as
Google Life Sciences, and Ethicon, a medical-device company owned by
Johnson & Johnson. Ethicon had been working on surgical robotics
with nonprofit research lab SRI International, and Verb licensed that technology.
Some
Verb employees, including Garcia and the company’s director of
research, Karen Shakespear Koenig, previously worked at SRI. The pair
are among the authors on patents originating in 2013 that describe a “hyperdexterous surgical system” and a “compact robotic wrist.”
The
documents detail systems with more mobile joints than surgical robots
on the market, saying that would allow for smaller, more capable robots.
They claim this would avoid one problem with existing robots: they
can’t reach certain “dead zones” in a patient, because their bulky arms
limit maneuverability. SRI declined to elaborate what technologies it
has licensed to Verb.
Robotic
systems that augment a surgeon’s thinking as well as motor control have
a better prospect of being used for a wider range of operations and
improving the results, says Duvvuri. “This is the kind of approach we
need if we are to figure out how to make a good surgeon into a great
surgeon and provide better care for the patient,” he says.
Garcia
of Verb also envisions being able to significantly increase the
productivity of surgery by making surgical robots with a degree of
automation. One surgeon might be able to supervise multiple theaters,
staffed by robots and less-skilled personnel, he said."
"Verb Surgical will look to implement a “transformative agenda’ in the
field of robotics,” with the goal of “democratizing surgery,” according
to Pruden.
In Pruden’s words, that means improving surgical outcomes through the
use of advanced robotics and informatics that puts the skill of the top
5% of surgeons in hospitals worldwide.
“The top 5% of surgeons can do things that the other 95% just can’t
do, in terms of improving outcomes and procedures. If you travel around
the world, it gets worse.
“We want to take it to the next level, and if we manage to deliver a
system which is built on making better decisions based on advanced
analytics, analyzing every decision that was taken by every machine as
it’s done,” Fitchet explained, “we bring the opportunity to bring the
level of outcomes up as well, meaning every surgeon can get the results
of those high operators in say the top 5% of their field."
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