You may have noticed the widespread use of robots in flicks set in some futuristic world. In these visions of the future, robots tackle all sorts of jobs, from personal assistant to doctor, and now, a team of surgeons has demonstrated that robot surgeons, aren’t likely to remain fictional ideas for long.
At the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) in Baltimore, Maryland, surgeons presented research outlining how they were the first to successfully use a remote-controlled robotic system inside the human eye during an operation.
The researchers recruited 12 patients in need of retinal surgeries and placed them in randomized clinical trials. Of these, six underwent surgery with the robot while the other half were treated using the standard human approach. The results? Out of the six in the manual procedure group, five experienced retinal micro-hemorrhage events. Meanwhile, the group that received robotic assistance only had two cases of such bleeding.