13 replies to this topic

[maestro949]

This is impressive. The precision and accuracy are far more significant than a human surgeon. Humans can work at an organ level. Robotics can work at a cellular level.

Link: http://www.cbc.ca/te...ry.html?ref=rss

Here's a video explaining NeuroArm and some of the challenges building a robot that can work within an MRI machine.

With improvements in robotic surgery, proton therapy, vaccines and the next generation of smart chemotherapies, I'm guessing that by 2050, all but the most aggressive and late stage detected cancers should be fully treatable. If early detection screening is mass deployed by then virtually nobody with access to the technology would be dying of cancer.

[Athanasios]

Thanks for the post Maestro, cool stuff indeed. I would guesstimate that you gave yourself a 15 year buffer on your timeline.

[Mind]

2050 is quite conservative, considering what has just been done. I'll see your 15 year buffer cnorwood....and raise to 25.

[forever freedom]

Suergeons should be considered warned; when more advanced forms of AI arrive, they will be one more segment victim to creative destruction. Actually, once more advanced forms of AI arrive, the vast majority of jobs will be taken by AIs. I wonder what will happen then.

[Cyberbrain]

That's very impressive!

[Shannon Vyff]

I shared this one with my kids, I'd seen it on KurzweilAI's newsletter (free and worth signing up for if you are not already on their email list http://www.kurzweila...ex.html?flash=1 )

Thanks for putting up the video, very awesome. Having a robot remove a tumor, using microscopes and precision electronics to accomplish what a human eye could not, is inspiring to the development and public view of what we call 'transhumanism'

[maestro949]

2050 is quite conservative, considering what has just been done. I'll see your 15 year buffer cnorwood....and raise to 25.

I've backed off a bit from my earlier 2030 projection on smacking down cancer after researching it more. I've also incorporated the concept of technological feasibility vs. economic feasibility into the projections I've been plotting. There are many advancements coming into, or that are already well within the realm technological feasibility, however the economic cost to devise and mass deploy future versions of tech solutions like NeuroArm are still outside our grasp and will be for some time.

I hope I'm wrong but I believe that for the notion of age-slowing and rejuvenation therapies to take center stage in the public's mind, cancer has to be in full remission or well on it's way. It's a roadblock yet it's also a model disease that shares many traits with aging thus we can point to our success in treating it as an example of how human ingenuity can leverage technological innovation to tackle complex diseases.

We need more philanthropists commissioning these types of projects.

[VictorBjoerk]

Very interesting!

http://news.sky.com/...1312960,00.html

http://www.sciencepr...ough-the-mouth/

Operations like this are apparently rapidly advancing and developing.No scars!

[Mind]

Robot Removes Kidney - WITH ONE INCISION!!!

Using the da Vinci surgical robot from Intuitive Surgical Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), the Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit) recently removed a diseased kidney using a new procedure designed by its surgeon, Craig Roger. The procedure, which has now been performed on two patients, proving a concept which could enable engineers to design special one-incision surgical tools for performing other types of surgery. The "Holy Grail" is reducing "open heart" surgery to a single, non-invasive, procedure requiring only a single small incision.

"This is the first time that a robot has been used to remove a kidney through a single incision," said Mani Menon, director of the Vattikuti Urology Institute at the Henry Ford Health System. "We expect robotic instruments to be designed specifically for performing single-incision surgeries."

About 55,000 patients annually have kidneys removed, usually using open surgery that requires a foot-long incision and sometimes requires the near-removal of a rib.

"Others have performed single-incision surgery [manually], but by using the robot we have opened the door to performing much more complex procedures, such as heart surgery," said Menon.

[Mind]

Robot assistant gives surgeons a cutting edge.

The advancements keep coming and are getting better all the time.

The surgeon's eyes dart to the left, and instantly a robotic laser shifts position and gets to work on a new section of tissue. No, this is not telekinesis, but a new eye-tracking technology that could soon be giving surgeons a hand during tricky procedures.

The device has been integrated into a da Vinci surgical robot - a tool that allows surgeons to perform keyhole procedures by mimicking their hand movements. However, according to a team from the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London, surgeons often need more than two hands when it comes to positioning additional instruments such as endoscopes or lasers.

Their device uses the surgeon's gaze to direct these tools instead. It shines an infrared LED on each eye, and cameras track the relative movement of the pupil and the "glint" of reflected light on the cornea to calculate where the surgeon is looking. The information is used to move the instrument to a new position on the patient. Since the surgeon will only want to use the feature at certain times in the procedure, the device is activated by a foot pedal.

[Mind]

Robot to detect and remove/kill cancer cells all in one procedure

I have never gone into an MRI machine. Wouldn't there be some pain or discomfort associated with robotic surgery, and if a person moves around too much, wouldn't interfere with the MRI imaging. Anyway, this is could be big for cancer sufferers. The current method of detection and then waiting a few days/weeks to get the lumpectomy (or other treatment) just gives the cancer more time to spread.

With the robot, the three months between mammogram and treatment can be reduced to a hospital visit and the cancer can be stopped before it spreads, said Rao Gullapalli, a collaborator on this project from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

But what makes the robot stand out is its ability to work inside an MRI machine, Gullapalli said. Because it is made of titanium and stainless steel, the robot won't be disrupted by the scanner's magnetic field.

The robot can also access areas in the human body that surgeons can't, said mechanical engineering graduate student Kevin Lister, who worked on the project with Desai.

Desai said he and his team have built only a preliminary model so far; not a fully functional one. The final version of the robot will take about four years to complete, he said. He received a $1.27 million grant last month from the National Institute of Health.

But even if the finished product does work according to plan, Gullapalli said it might not find immediate success in the medical community. After all, the robot will have to go through FDA approval, follow guidelines and prove it makes a big difference before it is widely used.

"We're not just governed by technology," Gullapalli said. "We're governed by bureaucracy as well."

[lucid]

Thanks for the video Maestro,
This really is revolutionary. Amazing.

[Mind]

Robot that can operate on a beating heart.

Holy mackeral! This stuff is amazing.

"We know how to repair valves. But what patients and doctors want is a more rapid recovery," says Marc Gillinov, a cardiac surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved in the research. It can take two or three months for a patient to recover from an open-heart procedure; if the heart didn't have to be stopped, the recovery time could drop significantly. Performing the surgery on a beating heart would also give the surgeon instant feedback on the effectiveness of the procedure. "You'd know just as you do it whether the valve is working well," Gillinov says.

Howe says that, moreover, a number of studies show that stopping the heart can result in long-term cognitive deficits, and that older or frail people in particular don't always respond well to bypass machines. He hopes that his system will make heart surgery safer.

[Mind]

Video Assisted Thoracic Surgery - Yet Another Weapon in the Arsenal Against Cancer.

Conventional or open surgery for lung cancer requires a six to 10-inch incision, cutting the major muscles overlying the chest. The surgeon spreads the ribs apart with a retractor in order to view and gain access to the lung, sometimes even removing a portion of one rib. With open surgery or VATS, the surgeon removes either a section of the lung or the affected lobe.

VATS is performed with two to four small incisions (the main incision is only 2 inches long). Instead of spreading the ribs, the surgeon gains access to the lungs through a space between the ribs. By inserting a small camera, the surgeon has a magnified view of the organs on a monitor in the operating room.

"Anecdotally, we've observed similar outcomes with open surgery and VATS, but we've seen a significant advantage with VATS concerning quality of life matters," says Walter Scott, M.D., a thoracic surgeon at Fox Chase Cancer Center, one of few surgeons in the country who performs this highly-specialized surgery. "Now, we have well-analyzed comparison data that supports what we've observed in our patients."

For the study, Scott and his colleagues analyzed the records of 140 lobectomy patients who underwent VATS (74 patients) and open surgery (66 patients) for stage I non-small cell lung cancer. Five of the 74 VATS lobectomies were converted to open procedures. Operative mortality was 1/66 (1.5 percent) for open surgery and 1/74 (1.5 percent) for VATS.

"The most exciting finding is that our patients go home much sooner when they have VATS compared to open surgery," Scott says. The post-operative hospital stay was four days for VATS patients and seven days for open surgery patients (P<0.0001).

"VATS patients also had the post-operative chest tube removed sooner than patients with open surgery," he says. Adjusted median chest tube duration was 5 days for open surgery versus 4 days for VATS (P<0.0001) The percentage of patients with any complication was 42 percent for open surgery versus 35 percent for VATS (P=0.516).