A Chinese Medical Robot Performs Dental Surgery On Patient

samminator (74)in #science • 6 years ago (edited)

China is at it again. Yesterday, I made a post on the rise of robots in the medical field, and how Dr. Xiaoyi (robotic doctor) is set to create a revolution in the field of medicine. But I think the revolution has already begun. A medical robot has independently operated on a human patient to implant two new teeth into the patient’s mouth.

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The surgery was done without much input from human doctors. This is truly the first ever in the history of medicine to have a fully independent robotic surgery. From the report of morning post, the surgery lasted for more than 60minutes which saw the implanting of 3-D printed teeth into the patient’s mouth. The precision index of the procedure was amazingly high. According to report, the error margin was between .2 to .3 (lower than some humans).

Post surgical preparations

Even though the surgery was done independently of human assistance, there were human preparations prior to the surgery. Also, some programmings were made to the robot, while being positioned for the surgery.

This is just a little step in the right direction. In the future, we could see robots do the pre-operative preparations, the main surgery, and the post-operative procedures.

Will this replace the need for human doctors?

I believe the fears are really getting stronger. Even though we’ve been made to believe that these robots are meant to compliment humans and not to substitute humans, would these really work as planned?

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Robotic medical assistant

There’s no doubt to the fact that humans are prone to errors, and plus the shortage in the number of dental practitioners, the creation of the robot was imminent.

Judging by statistics, over 400million people in China alone need dental implants, but only about 1million are done in a year. This gap is created by the shortage in medical practitioners. To fill this gap, another alternative had to be sourced; robotic surgeons. Is this really a very viable alternative?

Beyond dentistry

Robot assistance is not only limited to the area of dentistry alone. We’ve also seen minor aids from robots in other areas; even in brain surgery and also eye surgery.

The future of AI in medicine has already been charted. We should all brace up for impact.

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