21st Century Innovative Technologies and Developments as also discoveries, curiosity ( insolite)...

It’s another victory for the machines: a robotic surgical system outperformed humans and robot-assisted human operators in a soft-tissue procedure, bringing us that much closer to automated medical care (and the robocalypse).

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) was designed at the Children’s National Medical Center as an attempt to bring automation to soft-tissue surgery, a field where the versatility and spatial skills of human surgeons have long made them essential.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved an injectable pacemaker that doesn’t require wired leads, which often lead to complications.


Image: Medtronic
The one-inch long Medtronic-built device, called the Micra Transcatheter Pacing System, is about a tenth the size of traditional pacemakers—making it the smallest in the world.

It’s intended for patients with atrial fibrillation (an irregular or rapid heart rate) and other dangerous arrhythmias, including bradycardia-tachycardia syndrome. The FDA approved the device in light of a Medtronic clinical trial involving 719 patients who were implanted with the device. After six months, around 98 percent of the patients experienced adequate heart pacing. A small fraction (7 percent) of patients experienced major complications, such as cardiac injuries, device dislocation, and blood clots.

THEY don’t drink, they don’t get tired and they don’t go on strike. To hospital managers, the idea of robots operating on patients without human intervention is an attractive one. To patients, though, the crucial question is, “are they better than human surgeons?” Surgery is messy and complicated. A routine operation can become life-threatening in minutes.

Such considerations have meant that the role of robots in operating theatres has been limited until now to being little more than motorised, precision tools for surgeons to deploy—a far cry from the smart surgical pods and “med-bays” of science fiction. But a paper published this week in Science Translational Medicine, by Peter Kim of the Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, and his colleagues, brings the idea of real robot surgeons, operating under only the lightest of human supervision, a step closer. Though not yet let loose on people, it has successfully stitched up the intestines of piglets.