� A new ‘language’ for surgery? | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com
After watching surgeons using robotic systems for a while, computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University have decided to borrow ideas from speech recognition research to build what they’re calling a ‘Language of Surgery’. In speech recognition, basic sounds are called phonemes. For surgery tasks, such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue, the basic steps have been named ‘surgemes.’ The mathematical models used by the researchers have several goals: evaluate a surgeon’s work and help doctors to improve their operating room skills. They also want to ‘enable robotic surgical tools to perform with greater precision.’
This was an excellent blog entry that gave more insight on how automated surgery may work. I have always been somewhat skeptical, but keep an open mind, about automated surgery.
Reading the original paper is recommended for scientists and enthusiasts of this topic.
I found it very interesting how they were able to take computer recorded motions and show a difference between expert and non-expert surgeons. I would like to know how they were able to classify these surgeons as expert.
My biggest problem with the concept of automated surgery is that surgery is not just science, but also art. I see this as a computer telling you if you are using correct technique, but the day is far away where it can be done truly automated. A fair comparison is to pitching in baseball. You can learn proper mechanics, but pitchers that have perfect mechanics do not always do well and pitcher s with poor mechanics or different delivery styles can thrive.
One are where I can see robotics helping in the near future can be to do some smaller steps that may be difficult to do, such as suturing a bladder to urethra, which can sometimes be difficult and is hard to learn.