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Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

arstechnica.com

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Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#21
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10251

https://h-surgical-robot-transformer.github.io/

Approach:

[Our] policy is composed of a high-level language policy and a low-level policy for generating robot trajectories. The high-level policy outputs both a task instruction and a corrective instruction, along with a correction flag. Task instructions describe the primary objective to be executed, while corrective instructions provide fine-grained guidance for recovering from suboptimal states. Examples include "move the left gripper closer to me" or "move the right gripper away from me." The low-level policy takes as input only one of the two instructions, determined by the correction flag. When the flag is set to true, the system uses the corrective instruction; otherwise, it relies on the task instruction.

To support this training framework, we collect two types of demonstrations. The first consists of standard demonstrations captured during normal task execution. The second consists of corrective demonstrations, in which the data collector intentionally places the robot in failure states, such as missing a grasp or misaligning the grippers, and then demonstrates how to recover and complete the task successfully. These two types of data are organized into separate folders: one for regular demonstrations and another for recovery demonstrations. During training, the correction flag is set to false when using regular data and true when using recovery data, allowing the policy to learn context-appropriate behaviors based on the state of the system.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#22
post #13

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The problem will more likely be that as progress is made, more complex cases will be tried, finally extending in the category of surgeries where training data is extremely scarce. In a field with dismal information retrieval infrastructure.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#24
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the more time goes by, the more I prefer robot surgeons and assisted surgeons. The skill of these only improves and will reach a level where the most common robots exceed the 90th, and eventually 95th percentiles. Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

What we really want is a world without need for surgery. So, the answer depends on the time frame, I guess ?

We will always need surgery as long as we exist in the physical world. People fall over and break things.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#25
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the more time goes by, the more I prefer robot surgeons and assisted surgeons. The skill of these only improves and will reach a level where the most common robots exceed the 90th, and eventually 95th percentiles. Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

>The skill of these only improve Citation effing needed. It's taken as an axiom that these systems will keep on improving, even though there's no indication that this is the case.

Humans can keep improving, we take that as granted, so there is at least one solution to the problem of general intelligence.

Now, robots can be far more precise than humans, in fact, assisted surgeries are becoming far more common, where robots accept large movements and scale them down to far smaller ones, improving the surgeon’s precision.

My axiom is that there is nothing inherently special about humans that can’t be replicated.

It follows then that something that can bypass our own mechanical limitations and can keep improving will exceed us.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, the more time goes by, the more I prefer robot surgeons and assisted surgeons. The skill of these only improves and will reach a level where the most common robots exceed the 90th, and eventually 95th percentiles. Do we really want to be in a world where surgeon scarcity is a thing?

>The skill of these only improve Citation effing needed. It's taken as an axiom that these systems will keep on improving, even though there's no indication that this is the case.

Most technological capabilities improve relatively monotonically, albeit at highly varying paces. I believe it's a reasonable position to take as the default condition, and burden of proof to the contrary lies on the challenger.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#27
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really want is a world without need for surgery. So, the answer depends on the time frame, I guess ?

We will always need surgery as long as we exist in the physical world. People fall over and break things.

Bold assumption. I agree regarding the foreseeable future, though.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#28

Would be great if this had the kind of money that's being thrown at LLMs.

"If?" This thing has a goddamn LLM at its core.

That's true for most advanced robotics projects those days. Every time you see an advanced robot designed to perform complex real world tasks, you bet your ass there's an LLM in it, used for high level decision-making.

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will always need surgery as long as we exist in the physical world. People fall over and break things.

Bold assumption. I agree regarding the foreseeable future, though.

It's really not a bold assumption?

Unless we can somehow bio engineer our bodies to heal without needing any external intervention, we're going to need surgery for healthcare purposes

Re: Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot

#30

Complications happen in surgery, no matter how good you are. Who takes the blame when a patient has a bile leak or dies from a cholecystectomy? This brings up new legal questions that must be answered.

Technology and the bureaucracy that is spawned from it destroys accountability. Who gets the blame when a giant corporation with thousands of employees cuts corners to re-design an old plane to keep up with the competition and two of those planes crash killing hundreds of people? No one. Because you can't point the finger at any one or two individuals; decision making has been de-centralized and accountability with i…

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