Brain surgery is one of the most delicate and time-consuming procedures in the medical world simply because of the sheer number of things that could go wrong. As such, it’s understandable that surgeons would take several hours to perform such an operation. However, a robot doctor recently made headlines because it could take those hours of effort and condense them into a couple of minutes.
Machines that can perform delicate medical procedures have been a thing for some time and they have made the lives of doctors who have access to them a lot easier. However, a robot that can conduct surgeries on its own and can surpass the speed of human surgeons is an altogether different concept. However, as Futurism notes, there are plenty of reasons to robot doctors are great with reducing the chances of mistakes being a major one.
The robot in question was created by researchers at the University of Utah who wanted to minimize the errors involved in brain surgery as much as possible. One of the ways it can do this is by shortening the amount of time that doctors tinker with the brain, to begin with, and the robot can do this by up to 50 times.
Accord to a recent CNN report, the robot can actually make a complicated operation that normally takes two hours and reduces it to a little over two minutes. The project was led by William Couldwell, a neurosurgeon at the university and he said that the machine is a “time-saving device,” more than anything else.
As to how it works, the machine basically takes a CT scan of a patient’s skull to determine which areas need to be drilled. Human doctors would be standing by the machine in case it needs to be shut down or if there are modifications that need to be made, which can be as precise as two millimeters of the target.
No comments:
Post a Comment