For the first time, a robot performs (and succeeds) a surgical operation without any human assistance

Surgical robots haven’t been a novelty for a long time, although few healthcare establishments have one of these extremely expensive devices. To tell the truth, these “robots” are not quite robots since a surgeon must always control the machine or supervise the stages of the operation.

But that was before, because technology is constantly progressing. Researchers from theJohns Hopkins University (USA) have just taken a big step by developing the very first surgical robot truly capable of operating without human assistance. The Star Robot (Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot), already used for (non-autonomous) surgery in 2016, has this time been “upgraded” so that an intestinal anastomosis can be performed (operation by laparoscopy) without any human intervention.

The operation was carried out successfully… on pigs. ” The results [sont] significantly better than those of humans performing the same procedure” if we even believe Axel Krieger, one of the researchers in charge of this innovation. There is no question (yet) of using this autonomous version of Star in the context of surgical operations on men, but we suspect that we will come to it one day or another…