New surgical robot can suture with the best of them, without human help
LA TimesSurgery — a profession filled with great hands, quick minds and big egos — may have a new star in its midst. × Peter Kim and Axel Krieger at Children’s National Health System discuss their new supervised autonomous robot, Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, which can perform soft-tissue surgery, shown here using pig intestinal tissue. When it comes to the laborious procedure of suturing together the sliced ends of the small intestine — a task akin to stitching together two slippery ends of a garden hose submerged in muddy water — “it does it consistently, it does it perfectly all the time, regardless of where you are,” said Dr. Peter Kim, associate surgeon in chief at Children’s National Health System in Washington. “We can run the robot really, really fast,” said study coauthor Ryan Decker, a senior engineer in the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National. “It’s like a surgical assistant.” By contrast, when STAR is in the operating room, “this is actually an autonomously functioning robotic surgery,” said Wright, who was not involved in the study.
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