Robot stitches tissue by itself

WASHINGTON -- Getting stitched up by Dr. Robot may one day be reality: Scientists have created a robotic system that did just that in living animals without a real doctor pulling the strings.

Much like engineers are designing self-driving cars, Wednesday's research is part of a move toward autonomous surgical robots, removing the surgeon's hands from certain tasks that a machine might perform all by itself.

No, doctors wouldn't leave the bedside -- they're supposed to supervise, plus they'd handle the rest of the surgery. Nor is the device ready for operating rooms.

But in small tests using pigs, the robotic arm performed at least as well, and in some cases a bit better, as some competing surgeons in stitching together intestinal tissue, researchers reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

"The purpose wasn't to replace surgeons," said Dr. Peter C.W. Kim of Children's National Health System in Washington, a pediatric surgeon who led the project. "If you have an intelligent tool that works with a surgeon, can it improve the outcome? That's what we have done."

If you've heard about machines like the popular Da Vinci system, you might think robots already are operating. Not really. Today, many hospitals offer robot-assisted surgery where surgeons use the machinery as tools that they manually control, typically to operate through tiny openings in the body.

But robot-assisted surgery has been controversial, as some studies have shown it can bring higher costs without better outcomes.

So why the push for next-generation autonomous robots? Proponents think there are cases where a machine's precision may outperform a human hand.

Wednesday's project is "the first baby step toward true autonomy," said Dr. Umamaheswar Duvvuri of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a head and neck surgeon and robotic specialist who wasn't involved with new work.

But don't expect to see doctors leave entire operations in a robot's digits, he cautioned.

The new STAR system -- it stands for Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot -- works sort of like a programmable sewing machine.

Kim's team at Children's Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation took a standard robotic arm and equipped it with suturing equipment plus smart imaging technologies to let it track moving tissue in 3-D and with an equivalent of night vision.