Autonomous robots perform first of its kind surgery using AI to follow senior surgeons vocal instructions

Technological advances in the health industry are some of my favourites for how far out into science fiction they often seem. It's where we see cool developments on incredulous things like BCIs with some now even able to translate thoughts almost directly to speech, shattering the locked-in language barrier. Robots are another part of the tech world that have been helping out with healthcare, and they've also just had a communication based upgrade.

A surgical robot recently completed a huge milestone for both its soft and hard skillsets. According to IFLScience, a robot was able to successfully operate on a pig's gallbladder by responding to vocal directions. Thankfuly robots seem far better at surgery than they are at soccer.

“This work represents a major leap from prior efforts because it tackles some of the fundamental barriers to deploying autonomous surgical robots in the real world,” said lead study author Ji Woong “Brian” Kim.

“That’s what makes this so so humongously difficult, because how do you write this down? How do you write that in code?” Dr Mathias Unberath, John C. Malone Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently told IFLScience.

“Can I watch a human learn what I’m supposed to be doing? If the answer is yes, things become, not trivial, but they’re considerably easier.”

This kind of learning is called imitation learning, and it's something people do all the time. When robots do this it's often a mix of machine learning and inputting data, but here it seems more restricted to video and voice training, which they seemed to nail. In this study the robots were able to complete the gallbladder removal with 100 percent accuracy after watching the tutorials. What a great use for AI.

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Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

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