Today Your Catheter Will Be Inserted By … a Robot

Robots may not only be cleaning your house and providing you with love and companionship in the coming years—they may also be performing your surgery. A team of engineers at Duke University have completed a set of feasibility tests that they call the "first concrete steps" toward making robot surgery a fully, er, operational process. The research team equipped a "rudimentary tabletop robot" with "eyes" that use 3-D ultrasound technology and hooked it up to an artificial "brain" that gave commands and processed real-time information. With the computer directing its actions, the robot was able to insert catheters into synthetic blood vessels and perform simulated needle biopsies. And, in the most recent experiment, the robot successfully touched a needle on the end of its arm to the tip of another needle inside a blood vessel graft. Robot surgery has been in the works since the early 1990s, with research labs ...